


What's Fixed Will Always Be Broken

by NightjarPatronus



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Cutting, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-02-16 09:59:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 29,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18689221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightjarPatronus/pseuds/NightjarPatronus
Summary: Quentin steps through the gateway to the afterlife convinced that his eternity awaits, only find himself back in the physical plane, stuck in a strange, unprecedented limbo. Every friend Quentin encounters and every decision he makes brings him closer to coming back to life. Meanwhile, demons from the nether plane are terrorizing the Earth, possessing unsuspecting magicians. Their summoner, an old enemy, is biding their time, waiting to destroy Quentin and his friends for good.





	1. A World He Can't Touch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quentin visits his friends. Kady stops a fight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, The Magicians Fandom!
> 
> I have been watching this show since last summer, but I hadn't contemplated writing for this fandom until about two weeks ago. Anxiety had been holding me back, but then the season 4 finale happened, and I thought, to hell with perfection! I write to make people feel things and this is what I'm gonna try and do! So I jumped into this story on a whim and so far I've enjoyed every second of it.
> 
> Like the title says, "what's fixed will always be broken", but here's my attempt at a little... minor mending. Because the whole fandom needs a hug, don't we?

> From your mouth speaks your lovely voice,  
>  the softest words ever spoken.  
>  "What's broken can always be fixed.  
>  What's fixed will always be broken."  
>  "Your Arms Around Me"—Jens Lekman

**_Quentin_ **

The metro card disappears from Quentin’s hand when he steps through the door. He stands in a stark black space, waiting for his new reality to unfold. His death had happened too quickly for him to wonder what lies in his new eternity. Death must be like this for most people—unplanned, unexpected. 

Which is why when things grow brighter around him again, Quentin is surprised to find himself in what looks like New York City. Present-day New York. It’s raining out. The water doesn’t seem to touch him. Droplets fall through him like he’s a visitor in a world he can’t touch. Is this it? Is this his new eternity? Wandering around like a— 

He doesn’t even know what he is.

All he knows is he’s not back in New York. Not completely, anyway. There’s something about the place he’s in that tells him a little too much. He can see where he is: standing in front of a brownstone, built in 1918, although there wasn’t enough funding to finish it ‘till 21, and the walls inside had been painted over nine times. But not the outside. The outside had stayed the same. Everywhere Quentin looks, he understands something he didn’t think he ever could. It’s already dark out, but even black has different shades for him to see.

And there are whispers in the air, too, voices that talk over each other like Quentin’s the only one who can hear all of them speaking at once. Some words sound like spells, words in languages Quentin can understand even though he hadn’t learned them in his time at Brakebills. One voice cuts above all the rest, and it prompts him to follow. He walks towards the source of it, into the brownstone’s entryway, up through the elevator, down the hall on the fifth floor. When the door to apartment 501 stops him from going further, he tries phasing. 

The walls put up no resistance when Quentin goes through. The kitchen space is bigger than he’d have imagined from the outside. Magically expanded, dimly lit, nothing lying on the counter. All the possessions are packed away into cabinets and drawers like someone had just moved into this space.

Yet for a seemingly new home, a lot of things in this room had been broken here, some more than once. The wine glasses and the plates and the flower vase and the mugs are all perfectly mended now, every little crack magically melded over like nothing had ever happened. But looking at these once-broken chinas, Quentin can make out shadows underneath the surface, all the places they had once been chipped, dented, cracked, shattered over. Mending means reminding something of what it once was, not that nothing has changed since.

And magic? Magic is visible now, every trace of every spell that had ever been cast in this room floating through the air on full display in front of him, ducking and weaving and brushing past each other, peacefully coexisting in such a small space. Quentin can see the ward, too—colorful keywords and phrases and equations weaving around each other until the whole room’s trapped in it, little flickering lights all lined up, spinning through the air in a pattern he thinks he should have remembered from somewhere.

Magic is alive in here. Alive in the way he is not.

“Eliot,” Quentin hears a familiar voice say.

Margo. It’s Margo. 

Quentin focuses on her voice, and maybe it’s just his imagination, but the spells around the air dim a little when she walks in. And all the whispers from the incantations used to cast them had ceased. Margo is standing in front of the couch across the room, so close Quentin thinks he can reach out a hand and touch her shoulder. He tries but realizes there’s no body for him to command, just his thoughts hovering in empty space.

Margo doesn’t notice anyone in the room beside Eliot. 

Eliot. Quentin’s mind gives a jolt. Eliot, who had been on the couch this whole time, blending in too nicely with the dark furniture. It feels wrong that Quentin hadn’t noticed El the moment he’d phased in the room. The smoke from the pipe in Eliot’s hand clouds over his silhouette in the dim space, making it even harder for Quentin to make out his form. The Eliot that Quentin knew made lights glow brighter by his mere presence. Now he’s sitting in a space that feels too big to fill, his face illuminated only by the glow from the fireplace.

“Hmm?” Eliot answers, looking up.

Margo plucks the pipe from his hand and sets it aside on the coffee table. She waves, crossing her fingers and uncrossing ( _Popper 44, followed by 87_ , Quentin remembers) to vanish the smoke from whatever drug he’s been taking, then she casts another quick spell to turn on the lights. Eliot startles when the brightness hits. Margo doesn’t speak, only gives him a stern look. 

“Sorry,” Eliot mutters, turning his gaze away. His cane is lying across his lap. He fidgets by rolling it back and forth on his legs with his fingers.

At the tone of El’s voice, Margo’s expression softens. She joins him at the couch and puts a hand on top of his. His cane stops rolling. He turns around to face her. “Kady called,” Margo says quietly. “Got a nasty case of Spitegolem possessions in Peru. Hedges, again.”

“Okay.”

“I’m staying ‘till Julia comes over.”

“You don’t have to,” Eliot says. But Quentin knows Margo will stay anyway. She always does.

“I’ll be back after midnight.” Margo leans her head on Eliot’s shoulder. “Don’t wait up.”

Eliot tenses but doesn’t move out of the way. Quentin watches him breathe out slowly. Eliot takes a few moments to relax at her touch before putting his arm around her. The time Eliot had spent inside the monster’s mind had apparently made him shy. It’s almost like he’s unsure how to deal with being back in his own body. 

Quentin only knows this as he watches El in real-time. It only strikes him now that he has no memory of his Eliot after they’d worked so hard to bring him back. He had only caught a glimpse of El for a few seconds after Margo expelled the monster from his body. All Quentin remembers is blood seeping out of the axe wound on Eliot’s stomach, drowning the grass and soil beneath all red; Margo calling Eliot’s name over and over, the sound of her voice breaking; Penny whisking both of them out of the forest before Quentin can say anything. 

God, why didn’t he say anything?

“Eliot,” Quentin tries to call out. “ _Eliot_!”

Neither Eliot nor Margo turns at the sound of Quentin’s voice. Quentin can’t hear himself, either. He doesn’t have a voice anymore; he would have screamed Eliot’s name if he could. 

_Eliot!_

The doorbell rings and Margo gets up to answer. It’s Julia. It has to be.

Just as Quentin tries to hover closer to the door, to get a look at his best friend, everything fades again. The world is shifting and turning and blurring and coming back into focus around him, moving while Quentin stays put. He’s standing in a brightly lit space now. Grand Central Station. People are pushing past him during rush hour without noticing he’s there, even though he feels like’s standing among them.

All Quentin wants is to go back to where he’d just been. He recalls the Eliot he’d just seen, an unrecognizable shadow of the man he had spent a lifetime with. As Quentin thinks about El, he can’t shake the image of the Monster touching his cheeks gently with Eliot’s hands out of his mind. The touch had left him startled for days, just as it startles him now. For days after it had happened, Quentin would lay silently at night, wide awake, remembering how the Monster’s touch had felt so familiar yet wrong in every way. And they had saved Eliot. Eventually, against all the odds, they had brought Eliot back, only to tell him Quentin had left without saying goodbye, without giving them time to make new memories that feel right.

And though his body’s gone and he has no heart anymore, Quentin, somehow, feels the heaviness in his chest just the same. A voice tells him to hold on to the pain. The voice sounds like Penny’s.

◊

**_Kady_ **

Grand Central. Kady was supposed to be inside Grand Central five minutes ago, but here she is, three blocks away, trying to keep two idiots from killing each other. They’re hedges from safe houses that’s been wanting each other dead since the '90s. She remembers their faces from her visit with Harriet three weeks ago.

They’d been one of the lucky ones. Hedges who hadn’t been caught by the Library and given Reed’s mark. Pete’s gonna pissed when he hears what they’re doing with the gift of magic that’s been ripped away from him.

“Hey. _Hey!”_ Kady shouts. “Break it up!”

They don’t hear her. No one ever fucking hears her, not even when she’s yelling. She hisses a familiar spell in Hebrew as she curls and uncurls her fingers in a particular order, a formation she’d taken months to memorize when she was sixteen. Ropes shoot out of the palm of her hands as she finishes casting, ropes of glowing red light that gets tighter the more you struggle.

The ropes find their targets and wrap themselves around the two men, binding their arms and legs and torso. Their eyes scream of panic when they lose their balance and start to fall. Kady rolls her eyes and casts another spell that catches them. It pushes them back until they’re standing again, facing each other like two thick walls with her standing in the middle.

When Kady was a kid, deliberate and damaging spells like this drained her like hell, leaving her shaking for hours after one single casting. Considering how much more fucked up her life had gotten of late, it’s not even surprising to her how easily battle magic comes these days.

“Library’s gone,” Kady tells them. Not true, of course, but they don’t need to hear about Alice. “Ambient’s all back in the air. Stop killing each other.”

The men aren’t talking over Kady now that she has their attention. Organizing that whole incorporate bond must’ve given her some kind of reputation, at least. Not that it was enough to fix what needed fixing. It’s never enough.

“He stole our spell book,” the first man says. Kady turns back to him, snapping her thoughts back to reality. He looks to be about her age, maybe a year or two older. There’s an uncertainty in his expression, one that his scraggly brown beard can’t hide.

The second man scoffs. “We’re trying to save lives, boy. You can get your parlor tricks somewhere else.”

“What book is it?” Kady asks. 

The younger man turns his gaze to the ground. A black leather-bound book had been thrust against the corner, split-open, some of its pages bent. On the bottom right corner of the cover is a round gold seal of a lizard curled up like a spiral from head to tail. One of Harriet’s books, then. She recognizes the title in Latin. _Victoria sequuntur somnia._ The Victory of Nightmares.

“I’ll ask Harriet to make another copy.” Kady picks up the book and dusts it before tossing it in her bag. “Leave. Both of you. You’ll hear back from us.”

Kady removes her searing rope spell and walks away, knowing they’ll do the same. Hedges don’t fight each other as much these days, not when Harriet’s back here with her freeform Wikipedia on magic. They’re all desperate for a taste after a dry spell. There are enough new tricks on the streets now to last them a while. 

Harriet’s standing by the Starbucks in Grand Central when Kady finally makes her way in. She stops a few steps away when she spots Zelda next to her; Harriet had always come to meet her alone. Kady knows that since Zelda had left the Library, she’d gone back to Earth to live with her daughter, but Kady hadn’t done anything with that knowledge, nor did she plan to. And yet there Zelda is, gazing cautiously at the cramped station during rush hour as commuters pushed past one another. Even when she’s out of her uniform, Zelda feels like a stranger here. She’s been plucked right out of a world where everything’s nice and tidy and filed away and placed amidst the chaos of the city.

“Kady—” Zelda starts but stops herself. Her hands pause in the air on both sides of her, poised with the palms pointing up towards the ceiling as they always are. The gesture, paired with her too-courteous smile, takes Kady right back to the Library.

Kady ignores Zelda and hands the battered book to Harriet, who takes it and tuts her tongue at the sight of it.

_Can you make a copy?_ Kady signs.

Harriet hands the book to Zelda, who immediately starts to blow off the remaining dust from the covers and smooth out the bent pages. Old habits die hard. 

_I’ll scan it,_ Harriet signs back. _This is restricted. Where did you find it?_

_Just on the street._ Kady shrugs. _Two hedges were fighting over it._

_Which safe houses?_

_85 and 67,_ Kady recalls. 

Harriet purses her lips, considering. _Tell them to go on my Reddit thread at midnight._ She looks at Zelda, who frowns but doesn’t sign anything in protests. _I’ll upload the pages there. If they can cast Maadawi’s Unmasking, they can see it._

This is the new order for Harriet’s side of the magic scene now, more or less. Freedom of knowledge sounds nice in theory, but the execution’s a lot more complicated. Harriet knows she can’t just lend all the books to everyone; some of these spells can kill someone if they fuck up one syllable. So under Zelda’s advice, Harriet had decided that difficult books have to be earned by casting an equally challenging spell. 

There’s no reason for Harriet to be the authority on this. But so far there’s no other candidate up for the job, and everyone who works for Harriet would feel kind of responsible if some place blows up 'cause of a spell gone wrong. Maybe one day they’ll work something out with Alice and the New Library. But Alice is still cleaning their old mess up in the Neitherlands, and Kady has a feeling Alice isn’t up for much else these days.

_I’ll text them,_ Kady tells Harriet.

Kady accepts two books from Harriet, identical copies of _Broderick’s Laws on Meta-Composition_. One for Safehouse 43 and one for Fogg to replace an old copy at Brakebills, which had apparently grown bored from neglect and disintegrated itself into ashes. Hopefully, Alice can fix up and repurpose the Library drop chutes for them. That’ll make it easier on Kady and Twenty-Three.

_One more thing,_ Harriet signs. _A few Shadowraiths had been unleashed around Australia. Western Australia, last I heard. I’ll double-check and text you the location._

Kady sighs, but nods. _I’ll get Margo._

They part ways before Zelda has a chance to try and speak to Kady again. Their goodbyes are usually quick. Kady’s glad that Harriet’s back, but considering all their exchanges before were purely transactional, she doesn’t know how to go about being friends with the woman. So, for now, she settles for not changing the way things are. Especially when Zelda’s here.

Especially when she can’t shake the feeling that someone’s watching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I know the Kady section is relatively shorter than the sections I gave to the other mains, but don't worry! I love Kady as much as I'm sure all of you do, and she'll have more moments to come—through the eyes of our boy Quentin.


	2. Wrestling with the Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Margo fights like a King. Quentin fights like a Quentin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here I go again! (Pun intended.)
> 
> I decided to post two chapters at once because I figured it'd be a little nicer than to leave you all with a tiny chapter (with no apparent resolutions whatsoever) to ponder over. We've all had enough of cliffhangers. But don't get too comfortable! From now on, it'll be one chapter update at a time!

**_Margo_ **

_The moment Margo realized she was a magician, she had frozen over a globe._

_It had happened after she’d finished the written exams for Brakebills. A few professors had called Margo into a room for a practical test and rambled on about a bunch of stuff she didn’t remember. The globe on the Dean’s desk had been spinning the whole time, spinning so fast that the whirring was the only sound she could hear. Margo remembered staring at the globe while the professors sat on one side of the room watching. Next thing she knew, she’d reached out her hand, intending to stop the spinning the old-fashioned way, only to go full Elsa over the globe and the desk that was right underneath, blue-white frost and all._ Let It Go, motherfucker. You’re Frozen.

_“Why do you think you’re here?”_

_That was the first question Dean Fogg had asked when Margo had come back into his office an hour later. She watched him across the unfrozen desk, the consent form in front of her unsigned._

_“Uhh,_ magic _?”_

_She had blurted this out before she could even consider being nice. She hadn’t meant to sound snarky right off the bat, but it was hard to keep the sarcasm to herself when Dean Fogg’s office looked so excruciatingly muggle. She’d grown up reading books about talking bears and vanishing clocks and horses that are ten stories high. Everything in the Dean’s office looked no more magical than the spicy tuna rolls she’d had for lunch._

_“Magic,” Fogg repeated. If he were offended by her attitude, he didn’t let it show. “You’re here because you can do magic, Margo. You’re not wrong.”_

_“Is this another test?”_

_“There are no other tests. You may sign the admission form now if you wish.”_

_Margo opened the cap of the fountain pen in her hand. The pen was given to prospective students for the exam, and those who’d passed all the tests got to keep theirs. The metal felt warm to the touch after she’d spent hours fidgeting with this pen. At that thought, the pen grew cold again in her hand. It was all so easy._ Too _easy._

_She clicked the pen shut, sat back, and glared, suspicion growing. “What’s the catch?”_

_“Ahh.” Fogg smiled. The smile was creepy as shit. Disconcerting, like he’d been expecting her question. “Well, I’m not certain_ catch _is the right word to describe magic. I think of it as a responsibility.”_

_She rolled her eyes. Responsibility? Jesus fuck. This speech sounded like something straight out of that first 1950’s Superman movie. How old_ was _this guy?_

_“Responsibility,” the Dean continued, “is not what we teach here. It is something you already possess. The reason you were brought to Brakebills.”_

_“What, 'cause I was good? ‘Cause I studied my ass off hard enough to get into law school?”_

_It was an excellent school, too. UCLA Law. Perfect for someone like Margo who was bound to start a fight no matter what. If people were gonna call her a bitch, she might as well make money out of it—out of shoving sound arguments down the throats of entitled white men and their attorneys in court. She was gonna have to give UCLA an answer in a week if she still wanted that spot._

_“What is it that you think makes you a magician?” Fogg asked. “Is it because you’re intelligent? Brave? Kind? Special?”_

_Margo stared at him instead of responding. Where did he think he was? Teaching kindergarten?_

_“I’ll tell you what I think. A theory of mine,” Fogg continued oh-so dramatically. “I think you’re a magician because you’re unhappy.”_

_“The whole world’s unhappy. Look at it.” Margo gestured to the world outside, glaring at it through the window in the Dean’s office. According to the view, it was raining hard as fuck out there. “So if your little theory’s true, why are we still here? Why haven’t we all flown over the fucking rainbow on unicorns?”_

_To his credit, Fogg chuckled. “The world is bleak, yes, but not everyone feels how fucked up it is like magicians do.” Margo arched an eyebrow at the word_ fucked _. “My theory is that we are magicians because we feel pain. We feel the difference between what the world is and what we would make of it.”_

_“So what, we’re being punished for trying to make shit better?”_

_“Magic can be a punishment for those who underestimate its consequences,” Dean Fogg admitted. “But it is neither good nor bad in and of itself. For most magicians, magic is the thing that makes this world a little more tolerable. Compensation for those of us who suffer the most from the grimness of it. You are strong, Margo, because you hurt more than others. Your pain is your strength.”_

_Margo had to admit, Fogg’s theory made more sense than she expected it to. So magic was some kind of silver lining for this shitty reality she had. She could live with that._

_She didn’t need to go on a full-on memory trip to remember how that meeting ended. Of course she’d signed the fucking form—magic was magic, and the school was free, and she was bored as fuck with real life. She was way too old for Hogwarts, and she’d grown out of her Fillory phase a month before middle school. Brakebills had found her just as she’d shed the last of her childhood fantasy of being rescued by a magical land far, far away._

_The irony was fucking unreal._

_And besides, whatever this_ pain _from magic turned out to be, it had to be better than spending the next ten years paying off her student debt. Which was a lot of debt. She’d accepted the UCLA offer but refused her dad’s trust fund. College was the last time she’d ever mooch off of the charity of a man who refused to hear what she had to say._

I’m a grown woman, _she’d thought as she’d signed the Brakebills form._ I can handle a little emotional boo-boo. What’s the worst that can happen?

_In retrospect, it was stupid of her to think choosing magic was an easy decision. Being at Brakebills had been a fucking blast the first year. She had met Eliot, and although she was pretty good at keeping her distance from people, this city-boy wannabe had a way of chipping away at her heart ‘till she caved. Eventually, she’d decided to make one exception. Just El. One person to give a shit about, which was fine. She could live with one little vulnerability._

_But then the second year had come along, and all that shit happened with Fillory, and before she could have a chance to tell life to fuck off from trying to screw her over, she’d found herself in a bigger herd. That was the real frustrating thing: she got stuck with all these liabilities, all these people her old pre-Brakebills self would’ve tried to ditch as hard as she could, as soon as she could. And yet, against all reason, she kept making exceptions for them._

_Even now._

Especially _now._

_Margo used to think being at Brakebills meant she’d found the hack to being less miserable. The easy way out of this blasted curse of the millennial life. Brakebills was free, and it was magic, and magic was a powerful secret that made her feel less shitty._

_Now? Magic was the monster that had nearly killed El and actually killed Q. And she would have paid every student debt on Earth if it meant getting Quentin back._

Margo knows Kady doesn’t wanna be in the desert any more than she does. 

They’re in a vast, open space within the Great Victoria Desert, and the dried-up shrubs that stick up over the sand may be the only sign they’re on Earth. Well, those, and the fact that six possessed hedges are stumbling their ways over, the white in their eyes completely fogged over, trying to snatch the ice axes from her hands. 

About twenty unpossessed hedges are standing nearby, having come out of their tents to watch. Penny Twenty-Three is running right behind Margo and Kady, close enough to catch up and help if something gets out of hand. Margo doubts anything can go wrong—she’d been doing good enough at target practice to take down half a dozen per battle.

It’s the middle of fall, but Australia doesn’t seem to give a shit about fall. Down here it feels like she’s still stuck in summer under the ruthless motherfucking sun, the heat evaporating every drop of moisture off her skin. She feels like she’s back in the Wandering Desert again, trying to stumble her way through. The surroundings, at least, is familiar, but that desperation simmering in her chest back then is nowhere to be found. It’s been replaced by a throb, a blow-to-the-gut kind of rage that makes her want to hurl her axes as far as she can.

Being at a new place always gives her a headache thanks to her fairy eye. This gift from the Fairy Queen, though much appreciated, is a bit much to handle when she’s fighting, so she’d taken to wearing an eye patch again for most of her fights. Right now she can see the victims possessed by Shadowraiths without having to filter through three dimensions’ worth of visual noise. She stops ten feet away from the nearest victim and thrusts one of her axes forward. Her shoulder and arm and wrist ache as she makes her hit, the axe spinning in the air before plunging its blade deep into the first hedge’s chest cavity.

Bullseye.

Margo holds up her hand, her palm parallel to the ground, and fans out all her fingers. She wills her axe to come back, and it wriggles itself out of the hedge’s body and spins through the air. With a smirk, she catches Sorrow by the handle. Perfect position for another throw. 

Apparently, the axes listen to her now, and her possession over them is way more than a “finders keepers” sort of bond. They’re loyal to her. If she wants them to come back to her, they’ll come soaring. If anyone else does, the axe embeds itself in the summoner’s eye—one particularly nasty hedge witch possessed by a Spitegolem had found that out the hard way.

Penny Twenty-Three had already zapped himself over as the hedge went down. He scoops the bleeding hedge up from the ground. They disappear back to Professor Lipson’s place before any of the other possessed hedges can grab them. The hedges on the sidelines cast incorporate bonds at the same time, bending their fingers in a pattern that’s now familiar to them. It’s a much weaker incorporate bond than what Margo’s used to, but it does the job. The purple smoke that exited the victim’s body is sucked into one of the six glowing bottles sitting by the periphery of the hedge tents. The hedges finish their casting, and one man steps forward and puts a stopper over the bottle’s mouth.

Kady blasts off a spell of hers Margo doesn’t know, and it forces one of the other possessed hedges back. The impact makes him stumble. He loses his footing and falls to the ground on his ass. Not the best position for a target, but it’ll do. Margo throws her other axe into him just as Penny zaps his way back, then leaves with the new victim.

The battle continues on for a few more tedious minutes that feel like hours, and yet also, somehow, goes by in a blur. Kady stands back-to-back to Margo and takes down two more. The two of them have got a good system worked out, a way of knowing what the other person needs without having to ask. De-possessing victims for three months would teach cooperation to anyone, even them. 

And then it’s over, and nothing derails from their plan. Every Shadowraith spirit’s been trapped back into a bottle. They’ll take these to Fogg. He’ll destroy them with this spell he’d worked out five months ago. End of story. The monsters Margo comes across now aren’t nearly as powerful as the ones that once possessed her friends.

Margo’s skin is coated in splatters of blood by the time she picks up her axes to head to the hedge tents. She’s dressed in a black jumpsuit that makes her conspicuous as fuck out here in the barren desert, but it’s the best thing to wear considering how much blood she’s dealing with. One look at Kady tells Margo they probably look as frazzled as each other, their hair frizzing and sticking up at all angles in this heat. Not the most graceful image. It makes them look like the crazy ones, not the demons they’d helped trap. 

“Hey. You! With the beard!” Margo calls out.

The gray-bearded hedge standing by the first hedge tent starts when he realizes Margo’s talking to him. He gives a little jump but tries to compose himself when she walks closer, axes in tow, blood dripping from the blades. A valiant effort; men could never _really_ hide their fear around Margo.

“Anyone else under possession?” Margo asks.

“Th-those were the last,” the hedge stammers. “Thank you. All three of you.”

Margo saunters past him and grabs one of the bottles with a Shadowraith spirit trapped back inside. It’s a black and unassuming bottle, and it looks like the one she and El had accidentally mixed back in Brakebills when they thought they were making gin. Well, them and Mike. She doesn’t think about Mike. 

“Listen up, all of you! See this?” Margo calls out and holds up the bottle to the hedges standing around the place. “This here isn’t a fucking djinn. Djinns are hard to make—believe me, I’ve done it—and the people who made them are never gonna wanna sell them. _This_ is an old whiskey bottle with the label peeled off, and a Shadowraith biding its time inside ‘till an idiot sets it free and gets everyone killed.”

“What she means is, do a revealing spell before you open something suspicious,” Kady steps in. Of course she does. She’s always the one defending the hedges over the dumbest mistakes.

“What she _means_ is—” Margo interrupts Kady with a hard glare that Kady reciprocates —“if you’re gonna mess with big-kid magic, go pick up a fucking book first and read.”

◊

**_Quentin_ **

The fight’s not over, but Margo and Kady don’t see the monsters they’d left behind. Purple smoke had been expelled from the victims’ bodies and trapped into bottles with incorporate bonds, but these creatures had separated themselves from the smoke somehow. They roam around in broad daylight in a parallel space outside of the physical plane. Quentin decides to think of them as Shadow Beings, fragments of demonic spirits from the Shadowraiths that the ice axes can’t hack away.

Quentin had been thinking about Kady after he’d watched her exchange with Harriet at Grand Central. Before he knew it, he’d been brought to the scene of the fight, presumably hours after Kady had left the station to find Margo. He’s glad to see Margo again, but something about her feels different like he’d traveled forward in time from when he’d seen her last with Eliot. Margo had been training with her axes, apparently. Her axe cuts were a lot cleaner than they had been when she’d hacked the monster out of Eliot’s body, her hits much more precise and remorseless like she had nothing left to lose.

“Margo! _Margo, watch out_!” Quentin calls out. 

The sound of his voice gives him a pause. He freezes and puts a hand to where he thinks his neck is and jumps when a hand, _his_ hand, brushes against his skin. Then he remembers where he is—the Shadow Beings are creeping their ways closer to where Margo and Kady are standing, oblivious to the Beings that lurk about.

Margo doesn’t hear Quentin, of course. Neither does anyone else except the Beings. They turn their necks toward Quentin—great, they can see him, too—and they glower, snarling and licking the pointed ends of their sharp teeth with their purple tongue. The Shadow Beings are a dark purple, so dark they look like they’d been forged from a void. Their eyes are electric blue with white, hot lightning zig-zagging across the irises. When the Beings look at Quentin, the lightning bolts in their eyes make his skin jump like he’d been zapped by an electric shock. Most remarkably, these Beings each have three long barbed tails to match the sharp claws of their talons, wings of oversized bats, a body of an elephant, and a face that vaguely reminds Quentin of an irritated cheetah. 

Not even Quentin hears the sound of the Shadow Beings’ steps as they move closer. They seem to tread on thin air, leaving no footprints in the desert sand. The only perceivable physical hint that something's there is the little trail marks left behind by their barbed tails, which hang slackly from their behinds. The Beings drag their tails forward as they prepared to pounce. So they operate across two planes and manipulate a bit of both: the physical _and_ the astral. If the latter even is where Quentin is right now.

At least there are only six Beings. At least the Beings haven’t decided to surround Quentin and his friends in a circle of doom. They are one unified front, pushing onwards like a great wall of terror. Quentin raises his hands in surrender and steps back slowly, wondering if he can whisk himself away from the scene before he gets attacked. But he can’t go. He won’t. Not when his friends are in danger from the invisible beasts.

To Quentin’s relief, Kady picks up the sound of the sand shifting nearby. She turns with a frown, looks down, then grabs Margo by the arm and whispers for her to look behind her. Before Margo can ask what’s going on, Kady’s eyes shift to the little vertical trails left by the three tails of the creature they both can’t see. “Something’s there,” Kady whispers. “Take off your eye patch. See if you can get a look.”

“Holy motherfucking shit,” Margo whispers back, pulling the eye patch off her head as she takes in the sight of the Beings—but not Quentin, who’s standing right by her.

“You see it?”

“Beasts. Six of 'em. I’m guessing they’re in the astral plane.”

Margo raises her hands and summons both axes from where she’d dropped them on the ground. As she faces the Shadow Beings again, axes in hand, the Beings had caught on. Quentin doesn’t even know if the Beings are affected by weapons that operate in the physical plane only, but the look of the sharp blade is apparently enough to jolt their defensive reflexes. They turn away from Quentin and run towards Margo.

One of Margo’s axes hurls through the air, _through_ the Shadow Being leading the pack, and lands with a dull _thud_ in the sand. Fear crosses Margo’s eyes now, fear Quentin hadn’t seen in a long time. As the head monster pounces on his friend, Quentin does the only thing he can think of—and jumps in front of her.

The first Shadowraith collides against his chest, and he tackles it to the side, but it turns itself upright immediately and lays on top of him in an attempt to crush him. If Quentin were corporeal he imagined his ribs would’ve broken, but in his current form—whatever it is—he feels nothing, only the weight of the beast as he scrambles to wiggle himself out from under its massive body. The other Shadow Beings stay back and wait. This Being is the ringleader. They must be waiting for their Alpha’s signal. 

The Being drags one of his talons across Quentin’s chest. Quentin, fortunately, feels none of the pain. He’s concentrating, trying to push the Being off him by gripping its stiff neck and forcing its head back. Quentin knows he’s the only person standing between his friends and a full-on Shadow Beings attack. Vaguely, he hears Margo mutter as she raises her other axe, probably wondering what the Being had stopped to wrestle. Something invisible to her eye. (Some _one_ , Quentin’s mind unhelpfully supplants.)

As the Being raises its talon again, aiming for Quentin’s neck this time, it vanishes on top of him, its form shattering into glass-like fragments before the air sucks them all forward along with pieces of its fellow pack members. Quentin takes in a deep breath, turns and scrambles his way back up, then looks down at his chest to assess the damage. Surprisingly the claws didn’t seem to cut through his skin at all. Maybe he only got lucky because he technically doesn’t have any blood left to bleed out.

Penny hadn’t answered Quentin’s question when he’d told him the secret he had taken to his grave, but the way Quentin had jumped in front of Margo without thought answered that question for him. Death hadn’t crossed his mind at all when he’d taken the hit from the Being. Quentin had jumped in front of Margo because Quentin didn’t want to lose her before he can talk to her again. Before he can tell her, and everyone else, that he’s back, and he wants to stay.

And now that he looks up, he sees the reason the Beings had vanished. Kady is bracing what looks like a wooden chest against her torso, her forehead gleaming with sweat as the box shakes violently and tries to wriggle itself free of her grasp. There are scrolls dumped on the ground by their feet. Maybe she’d pulled this chest from a hedge’s collection somewhere. Wood is a perfect temporary prison for spirits. Quentin can make out a purple glow from the cracks on the wooden chest that must have been the Shadow Beings. Kady must have used some kind of tethering spell to bind beings from the astral plane into the physical, into a form that can be destroyed.

“Not bad for a hedge witch,” Margo says, giving Kady a rare smile.

Kady rolls her eyes and forces the box onto the ground. A hint of a smirk crosses her cheeks, too. She locks her gaze with Margo and nods. The second she moves her hands away from the box, Margo slams down on it hard with her axe. She keeps chopping until the box shatters into tiny splinters of wood. Then she snaps her fingers and whispers a Hindi spell that lights a blue flame over the shattered remains which evaporates everything else.

“What. The fuck.” Quentin hears an unfamiliar voice behind him. He turns. A blond man in an old-fashioned Brakebills sweater and vest and khaki pants is standing a few feet away, staring at Quentin wide-eyed. “Quentin Coldwater. Back from the dead.”

Oh.

“Hyman?” Quentin guesses. 

“The one and only.” Hyman beams.“ Wow. I can’t believe it. I mean, I knew you were the Harry Potter of this story—I know what that is, I saw the movies from someone’s TV. But I was _devastated_ when you died, of course I was, but then I thought, well, Quentin’s gonna go on a little mind trip and talk to his Dumbledore and come back to life, right? The heroes always do. What took you so long?”

“What?” Quentin asks after a very long pause. He doesn’t even know which question to start with. Dumbledore who? And for _how_ long? “Okay. Not now. I… I need to get Margo. _Margo!_ ”

“Margo! Hey, Margo!” Hyman jumps in to help. He waves his arms over his head to catch her attention now that her eyepatch is off.

“Jesus fuck.” Margo squints and walks closer, crossing her arms. “You again?”

“Who is it?” Kady asks.

“It’s that astral projection perv, Hyman,” Margo explains. Kady rolls her eyes.

“Okay, _that_ hurts,” Hyman says. “Perv? I mean, I know I can be a little nosy, but _perv_?”

Quentin puts his head in his hands and takes a deep breath. He gets his voice back, technically, and a physical form, sort of, and Margo still can’t see him. Fuck. What even is he? Half-astral projection, half-still-dead? Something like that. And _Hyman_ , of all people, is the only one who knows he’s here.

“Hyman,” Quentin interrupts, “focus! Please. Tell her I’m here.”

“Right. Right. Okay. Margo! Over here!” Hyman catches Margo’s eye again and points next to him to where Quentin’s standing. “Quentin! It’s _Quentin_ —fuck, she can’t hear me.”

“Get out of my face, you nut sack!” Margo turns her back on Hyman. “My life isn’t a fucking Instagram story!”

Hyman jumps himself in front of her again. “ _Quentin_ ,” he enunciates as slowly as he can. “Fuck. Q-U-E-N-T-I-N—” he spells in the air in front of her with his finger.

“Write the letters in reverse!” Quentin shouts. “She can’t read it like this!”

“Oh yeah.” Hyman starts over, making sure the tail in the letter _Q_ points the other way. 

Hyman doesn’t get past the reversed letter _E_ before Penny Twenty-Three travels himself back into the desert. “Hey, ready to go?”

“Been ready twenty minutes ago,” Margo says, immediately turning away from Hyman as Kady silently grabs Penny’s arm. “What was the holdup?”

“Lipson wanted to talk,” Penny says. “I’ll explain later. Let’s go.”

“Wait! Margo!” Hyman walks around again. He points to Penny, then himself, then back to Penny. “Tell Penny. _Tell him._ Say Hyman’s here.”

Margo looks like she’s about to snap, and Quentin is praying to some unknown God that she does. But, as if life—or whatever this is, _half_ -life—hadn’t fucked Quentin over enough lately, Margo holds her tongue in the most un-Margo way. Quentin watches helplessly as she, Penny, and Kady disappear from the desert.

“Fuck,” Quentin mutters. “Great. Just great. I’m back, and I can’t tell anyone.”

“You’re back? You sure about that? Like, back for good? Back-from-the-dead back?” Hyman asks. “Because dude, I don’t know what you are right now.”

To prove his point, Hyman slaps Quentin in the shoulder. He tries to, at least; his hand goes through Quentin like he’s no more than a hologram. 

“I don’t know!” Quentin confesses. “I don’t know what I am! I thought I was dead! I walked through that door to the afterlife or whatever. I thought that was it for me. But then that—that _fucking_ door took me back here, and at first I literally had no body, I was—I was _hovering_ over everything, _everywhere_ , with my mind. _Just_ my mind. Nothing else. No voice, no nothing. Except now I have a voice again, and a body? Kind of? And you can see me, but not Margo. So I guess I’m not in the astral plane either, not completely. Fuck.”

“Okay. Let me get this straight—” Hyman runs a hand across his hair in frustration as he stares Quentin dead in the eye. “Margo can see me. She can’t hear me. I can see you. You can see me. We can hear each other just fine. But Margo can’t see you, so she doesn’t know you exist at all.”

Quentin shrugs.

“Okay. Okay okay okay.” Hyman sighs. “Alright. Wait here.”

“Wait, no no no, wait, _wait_ —” Quentin calls out, stopping Hyman before he can disappear. “Where are you going?”

“To get P Twenty-Three to come into the astral plane,” Hyman says very slowly, looking at Quentin like he can’t believe he hadn’t worked that out. “Duh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big shoutout to Lev Grossman aka the author of the original Magicians series for the general structure of Dean Fogg's speech to Margo. I tweaked it a little from the book's exact quotes, but I wanted Margo to be the one in the show's version of the story to hear this first, before she eventually passes this on to Quentin in her second year.
> 
> If you wanna chat to me about the show or this fic OR life in general, you can check out my tumblr writing blog @nightjarpatronus. It's a new blog, and it features my other fanfics as well as my original series. I've been moving some of my old writing stuff from my main @chaptersonetoinfinity, which is a big mishmash of several fandoms. COME SAY HI!


	3. In a Heartbeat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quentin hears about missing Shades. Penny sees a familiar face from his past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M BACK! (Just like Quentin!) AND IN CASE YOU WERE WORRIED ABOUT THIS FIC BEING ABANDONED, I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE! (Just like Quentin... or so we hope?)
> 
> I had a little bit of trouble figuring out what to do with this chapter even though I got half of it planned. And then a few days ago it finally hit me. Penny Twenty-Three was a difficult guy to write since we're still getting to know him, but I hope I did his story justice :)
> 
> Also, I am overjoyed at all the love and support you've been giving me! It's always great to hear from you. I'm on tumblr @nightjarpatronus, btw, in case you're up for a chat.

**** **_Quentin_ **

Professor Lipson scrutinizes the leather-bound book lying open on her desk. 

From where Quentin stands, he can make out an illustration of a creature with red eyes and a hulking body made of stones. They’re different than the Shadow Beings he’d just fought. Nothing else comes to mind. The world had become a little dimmer after Quentin had acquired a form, some kind of embodiment of his consciousness. Now the world tells him nothing more than he already knows, and shows him nothing besides the Beings no one else sees.

It had been a strange few… hours? Days? Weeks? 

Penny Twenty-Three had promptly informed him that he was gone for six months.

Quentin had only spoken to Penny for a few minutes after Hyman finally got Penny’s attention somehow. There was barely enough time for Quentin to explain his current unfathomable not-quite-dead predicament, or for Penny to realize he can’t touch Quentin’s form before Lipson had called again with a new discovery. So when Penny had zapped himself back into their former professor’s office, Quentin had followed along, hoping he could have more time to elaborate on how he managed to come back from the dead after Lipson’s update.

“These demon spirits you three have been fighting,” Professor Lipson says, folding her hands across her knees as she looks at Penny from across her desk, “do you know where they may have come from?”

It was a Saturday. Brakebills students were out enjoying the evening. The hallway by the infirmary was empty. Quentin can’t hear anything else around besides the ticking of the grandfather clock in the corner of Lipson’s office.

“It’s always Harriet giving us the news,” Penny says. “She never witnessed anything either. Those hedges must’ve called her for help.”

“Are you sure we can trust her?” Lipson asks. “This Harriet woman—her mother was a Librarian, wasn’t she?”

The door opens again. Kady stands there with her arms crossed. “We can trust her.”

Lipson looks unconvinced. “Look, all I’m saying is, maybe it’s not a coincidence that Harriet’s always the first person to know about these… these attacks. Possessions.”

Penny stands up to close the door. Kady walks in and around Lipson’s desk to take a look at the open book in front of her. “Look, if there’s anyone unleashing monsters around here, I don’t think Harriet’s the prime suspect. What’s her motive?”

Lipson turns to face Kady. “Overdue books?” she suggests with a shrug. “Look, I’m not saying Harriet’s the one to blame. But there could be someone else at play. Some motive that we haven’t taken into account.”

“Like who?” Penny asks. “Everett’s gone. I don’t know who else could’ve done this.” 

At the mention of Everett, Penny’s eyes drift over to where Quentin happens to be standing. After spending so long being invisible, having his presence known by someone else made Quentin strangely self-conscious. It dawns on him then that he’s wearing the same clothes he’d died in, a little memento of the person he had been. Which was pretty ironic, since passing through the underworld gateway was supposed to be about letting go.

Penny looks away before Kady can catch his gaze.

“Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Lipson asks. “Why now? Why all these possessions when nearly half the hedge population are incapacitated with Reed’s Mark?”

Quentin’s the only one in the room to notice Kady flinch. She pulls Lipson’s book closer to her and pretends to read the text by the illustration of the stone creature, clutching the cover tight enough that her knuckles turn white. Quentin walks behind her for a closer look, the sound of his footsteps unheard. The caption above the creature says _Spitegolem._

“About what you told me a few hours ago,” Penny says. Kady gives him a quizzical look—it must have been what Lipson talked to Penny about when she and Margo were still in the desert. “You said something about these victims are different. How?”

Quentin peeks over Kady’s shoulder for a better look at the text around the Spitegolem’s illustration in Lipson’s book. _Spitegolems are born from the remains of the Old Gods’ inventions, malicious Being brought to life by mistake and subsequently destroyed,_ he reads. _While its body can be eviscerated by its Creators, the Spitegolem’s soul cannot be destroyed. Instead, it is tethered to the physical plane by a heliotrope mineral, more commonly known as a bloodstone. When tethered to a bloodstone in the physical plane, a Spitegolem can only make contact with ghosts—souls of deceased mortals trapped in a time loop in which they relive their deaths._

“The victims’ Shades were gone,” Lipson says. “Each and every one of them. I noticed it first with the Spitegolems you two and Margo took out a few weeks ago, and every victim you guys brought to me after that had the same problem. So I found this book about Golems in the back room of the Library—Henry had to look for the master key, we haven’t opened that room in years. Anyway, there’s a chapter about Spitegolems here. They don’t sound like Golems we can take out with battle magic. See for yourself.”

Lipson turns the book around for Penny to take a look. Kady pulls another chair and walks over to Penny's side, while Penny leans back a little in his seat, leaving Quentin some space.

_It was once believed that, in their tethered state, Spitegolems cannot be unleashed onto the physical plane to take control of a mortal’s body. However, recent discoveries show evidence that this rule can be breached._ _Spitegolems can cross over to the physical plane and interact directly with mortals while also remaining in the nether plane, a space parallel to the physical plane in which malicious creatures who cannot be killed reside. With the aid of a once-mortal who now defies the rules of death, Spitegolems can breach through multiple planes at once and manipulate the world of the living._

Quentin looks at himself again, at the form he had found himself in. Where exactly had he been at the start, after he’d crossed the gateway? And what about now? What if _he_ was the mortal who had defied the rules of death? Could he have been the unwitting instrument in unleashing all the Beings that Margo and Kady had to battle?

The next line in the book answers his question:

_Forensic evidence gathered around sites in which Spitegolems possessed living victims, suggests that these malicious spirits were released from their bloodstone prison by the blood of their once-mortal accomplice, then re-trapped into corked bottles with weak incorporate bonds to be released by their future victims._

So it couldn’t have been Quentin. The Mirror Realm had refracted his spell and torn his body into shreds, blasting him into the Seam along with Everett and the Monster’s spirit. There was no blood left from him to be given. But who else could have done it?

“We fought Spitegolems eight weeks ago. You didn’t think to tell us earlier?” Kady glares at their former professor.

“I didn’t know if it was a one-off. I wanted to be certain before jumping to assumptions, so I waited to examine your future victims. Like the ones from today. The loss of the Shade is a common side-effect to exorcist rituals. You should know better than most.”

It was Quentin’s turn to flinch. He remembers how Julia had been after she’d lost her Shade, dangerously reckless with no emotional boundaries to rein herself in. Julia may have been able to amend her ways before it was too late, but he couldn’t say that for most people. Look what happened to Martin Chatwin. Look what happened to _him_ in timeline twenty-three.

“So you think these hedges’ Shades weren’t lost by accident?” Penny asks. “You think someone’s getting rid of their Shades on purpose? To turn them bad?”

Lipson nods. “Could be. Whoever’s behind this might be looking to motivate these hedges to use their magic for an immoral cause. Or, maybe, they found a way to harvest energy from Shades to power something else. Necromancy is a very taboo subject, highly under-researched. But it’s mathematically impossible for all these victims to lose their Shades. And I don’t believe Margo’s axes were to blame; I’ve examined them. The axes only tear away the consciousness of the possessor from the corporeal form of the possessed. The Shade should not have been affected.”

“We saw something else,” Kady says. Lipson looks at her, one eyebrow raised. “Well, Margo did. I didn’t have a chance to ask her about them.”

Penny turns to face Kady. “What did you see?”

“After we trapped back the Shadowraiths’ spirits today, I saw the sand around us shift, like something else was still there. Margo looked with her fairy eye and said there was some kind of monsters left behind.”

“What kind of monsters?” Lipson asks.

“I can’t see their forms. I don’t know what they look like,” Kady says. “But if I saw the sand shift, that means they still interact with the physical plane somehow, right? What if that’s the kind of breach between the planes this book mentioned?”

“That’s possible,” Lipson agrees. “I’ll have to look into them. Shadowraiths, right?”

Kady nods. Someone knocks on Lipson’s door and opens it ajar. A healing student in a nursing cap peeks her head in. “Professor? Someone woke up.”

Lipson stands up. “That’s one of your Shadowraith victims,” she says to Kady as she walks out. “I’m gonna go keep a close eye them. See if I can find out where their Shade went.”

The moment Lipson closes the door, Kady stands up. “I’m going back to Marina’s.”

Penny doesn’t respond. It takes Quentin a second to realize Penny had projected himself into the astral plane and is staring directly at Quentin. “What about you?” Penny asks. “You were there. Did you see those monsters she was talking about?”

“I saw them,” Quentin confirms. “And they can see me. And one of them attacked me.” 

Penny stops for a few seconds, surprised. “You’re one of those mortals who defied death, right?” he finally asks. “Maybe that gives you some kind of contact with them?”

“That’s exactly it,” Quentin says. “I’m not all the way here right now, Penny. You can’t touch me. You’ve tried. Hyman did, too. But one of those Beings tackled me, so clearly, I’m closer to where they are right now.”

“Hey, _Penny_ ,” Kady calls out. She touches his shoulder when he doesn’t appear to turn around. Penny gives a jolt and immediately jumps back into his physical body.

“Sorry, I was—”

“You were in the astral plane,” Kady finishes for him. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. “Yeah, I figured. Who were you talking to?”

“Look. This is gonna sound ridiculous,” Penny admits after a pause. “But Quentin’s here.” 

“That’s not funny.”

“Look, I’m serious!” Penny gestures to where Quentin’s standing. “I know it sounds crazy, but he’s right here! I can see him on the astral plane. Margo can’t—we don’t know why. Hyman found him in the desert when you two were there earlier.”

“How?” 

“That’s what we were trying to figure out before Lipson called us back in.”

Kady walks over to the door. “I’m gonna go find Julia.”

“What—no! We can’t just tell her—”

“Jesus fuck, Penny, you don’t get to decide!”

“All I’m saying is—” Penny raises both his hands in surrender—“we don’t know what this is. Why it happened. We don’t even know if we can pull him back all the way.”

“Yeah, so? He’s Julia’s best friend! She shouldn’t be the last to know,” Kady insists, then sighs and looks past Penny’s shoulder. “Fine. You know what? Ask Quentin. See what he thinks.”

Penny projects out of his physical form to face Quentin. “Your call.”

The grandfather clock is still ticking in Lipson’s office, second by second. It’s one minute to six. Through the window, Quentin sees that the sun is setting. At least he knows he’s in real time again, moving alongside his mortal friends. Maybe something can be done—the fact that he’s almost halfway back here gives him hope.

But hope isn’t nearly enough, not where Julia is concerned. Quentin wants to tell Julia he’s here. But Quentin can’t tell her that he’s _back_ , and he doesn’t even know if he’s back for good, or if it’s just some kind of glitch in the underworld, and he’ll find himself back there when they get that fixed up. What he needs now is answers. After all the two of them had been through, it seems cruel to leave Julia with nothing more than a possibility.

Before Quentin can tell Penny anything, Penny vanishes into thin air, leaving Kady standing here alone. Kady whips her head back in panic as she readies her hands for a potential fight, powering up a spell that glows bright green. But there’s no one here.

◊

**_Penny Twenty-Three_ **

_Julia shuddered as she joined Penny on a bench behind the greenhouse, kicking the pile of clothes under her bare feet. With all the elimination tests they’d gone through, this week couldn’t have ended soon enough. This was the last Trial and by far the most ridiculous. Penny hadn’t expected “naked truths” to be literal in the dead of November._

_“Turn around,” Julia prompted, opening the jar of paint._

_“This is so dumb,” Penny said, shedding his vest._

_The moment Penny turned to face Julia, she dabbed his nose with a greasy dollop of paint on her fingertip. She laughed when he retaliated by pulling her in for a kiss, smudging both their faces. “I don’t know,” she teased. “It’s not all bad.”_

_Penny was quiet as he looked at her and tried to crack a smile. In moments like this, he always expected to be overheard. The voice in his head that belonged to The Beast always lingered at the edge of his awareness, intruding on Penny’s life like a head that’s continuously peeking over his shoulder. It was Penny’s own fault for trusting the voice back in high school when he had no one else to talk to. Penny had let a stranger into his mind until they knew him better than he knew himself._

_Julia traced his collarbones with the paint in her hands. She shook her head when Penny tried to mutter an apology, every bit the psychic that he was. Penny shifted in his seat and pulled her close. The unforgiving wind had already taken a toll on her; her skin felt cold to the touch. She relaxed when he wrapped his arms around her to warm her up, and he smiled despite himself. The Beast might have been in his head, but he was the only one who could feel Julia’s heartbeat._

_They didn’t know how long they stayed like this before they broke apart, trembling in the cold once again. They were still smiling as they bonded their hands with ropes and whispered their confessions. Penny had told her he didn’t know he was the type to fall in love until it happened—when the Beast had nearly infiltrated the wards around Brakebills two weeks ago, and Penny had jumped in front of Julia as the Beast fired a spell. Professor Lipson had told him he was lucky to be alive. Dean Fogg’s last line of defense around the perimeters had caught the spell before his body could._

_Before the clock struck midnight that night, Penny had confessed he was scared. He’d admitted that it terrified him to realize how much he cared, that maybe he wasn’t ready, and perhaps she shouldn’t wait around for him to get his shit together. Julia had kissed him as the rope fell from his wrists. She had told him that love takes his time, and promised she’d be around when his time comes._

_It would be the one promise she had to break._

Penny is standing in a tent of lights. Across from him is none other than the woman he’d lost. Julia steps back when he reaches out to touch her. “Sorry,” she says, “we can’t.”

“Julia?” Quentin asks, appearing behind Penny.

“It’s so good to see you. Both of you.” Julia smiles. “We’re in a Tesla fraction. We only have—”

“Two minutes,” Quentin finishes.

Quentin startles when Julia nods. It must have been the first time Quentin was heard by anyone else besides astral projections. 

“Where are you?” Penny asks. “Is everything okay?”

“Not really. But I know it will be one day since you’re here.” She smiles. “And you, Q. What timeline are you in?” 

“You… you know?” Quentin asks.

“Fogg told us,” Julia says. “It was you who figured it out, Q. You realized there was something weird about that Eliza woman. So we followed Fogg around for a few days. Found out he knew more about the Beast than he was telling. And Alice drugged him with a truth potion. Fogg’s out there right now, powering this spell.”

“We’re in timeline forty,” Quentin says. “This is the last.”

“I see.” Julia’s smile wavers. “And the Beast?”

“Dead,” Penny says.

“Wow,” she says quietly. “I can’t believe it. One of these days we’ll actually win.”

There’s something about Julia’s smile that stirs up memories Penny had spent the past few months trying to bury. The lights around the Tesla fraction shine brighter like they want him to get a closer look at her face. His throat is tight when he opens his mouth again, but he forces himself to speak. “Did Fogg tell you which timeline you’re in?” 

“Twenty-three. So… seventeen more to go,” Julia adds, wincing. “Maybe it’s a good thing that I won’t remember.”

_Penny had fallen for Julia the first time he saw her, only he didn’t know it then. They had been sitting outside the Dean’s office after their written exam, waiting to be called in for the practical test. She was sitting across from Penny by Quentin’s side. A professor called Quentin’s name, and Julia grabbed his hand before he could walk over. She whispered something to him, something Penny couldn’t hear. They shared a smile before Quentin walked into the room, the look of hope in her eyes reflecting in his._

And now his Julia is here, smiling even as she learned her death was inevitable in her time. Penny meets her eyes and tries to smile back, feeling his heart drop. The hope in her eyes shines just as brightly as it did the first time he saw her. Julia’s thinking about the future like Beast is the only thing standing between herself and a happy ending. There was a time when Penny had thought the same. 

Penny had come into timeline forty thinking he had nothing else to lose, only to fall for Julia all over again and watch her lose everything. He doesn’t have the heart to tell Julia that so much more could go wrong— _had_ gone wrong—in a world without the Beast. So much had gone wrong in this timeline, no one even thinks about the Beast anymore.

“Where are you?” Penny asks. “And where was I?”

“Somewhere in the Sahara Desert, maybe?” Julia guesses. “We both passed Mayakovsky’s tests, but you stayed behind for Traveler training. I wish I can wait for you, but there’s no time.”

“You’re going to Fillory,” Penny realizes.

“We’re gonna go look for the Watcherwoman,” Julia explains. “But I can’t leave without saying goodbye somehow. Even if it’s some other version of you. Even if you can’t remember.”

_But Penny did remember. He remembered her goodbye. He remembered coming back from Brakebills South to find Julia gone; Alice finding him in hysterics, asking him to take her Fillory; Quentin’s body on the grass, Alice screaming as she ran over to Quentin’s corpse, ripped to unrecognizable shreds._

_And he remembered Julia most of all—Julia desperately closing her hands over a wound that cut through her chest, slumped against a wooden cabin with the door ajar and overwhelming magic pulsing from inside, blood dripping from a silver pocket watch hanging from her wrist. Penny had held Julia as she died, closing his hands over hers, over the gash across her chest. Her heart had stopped beating before he could take them home. Her blood didn’t wash out of him for weeks after he’d buried her, even after he’d scrubbed himself hard enough to break his own skin._

_“I love you,” she’d whispered. “I’m sorry.”_

“Why the Watcherwoman?” Quentin asks, his voice thick.

“You found Jane Chatwin’s book in the Library, up in the Neitherlands. You realized who she is, what she does. You think maybe we can find her and ask her to send us back to a time when the Beast is still learning to control his magic. A time when he can be stopped.”

Quentin shuts his eyes for a second and sighs, his breath shuddering. “You don’t have to come with me, Jules. You’ve seen us. You know this time it won’t work. Let me go alone.”

“And let you have Fillory all to yourself?” Julia jokes, her voice breaking. “Q, you can’t save me. I’m not in the fortieth timeline. My death is already set in time.”

“You don’t know that!” Penny protests. 

Julia startles at Penny’s raised voice and gives him a sad look. “You could never lie to me. Either of you. You’re both looking at me like I’m already dead.”

“It hasn’t happened yet,” Quentin insists.

“But already has,” Julia explains. “Horomancy’s a real bitch, huh?”

“Maybe you survived,” Penny tries again. _Like I did. Don’t go._

Julia shakes her head. “You’re going, Q. So I’m going. I’m not gonna let you die alone.”

“And why not?”

“You were always the first to die,” she tells Quentin. “Did you know that? That’s what Fogg told us. In all the other twenty-two times we’ve been through this, you wanted to take down the Beast alone and save all of us.”

“Yeah, and it’s never enough!”

“And why should it have to be? I would’ve helped if you’d asked. But you’d never ask. You always wanted to be the sacrifice. Why does it always have to be just you?”

Quentin recoils at her words but doesn’t say anything. The lights around the Tesla fraction start to flicker. They’re running out of time. Fuck. Why are they always running out of time?

Julia notices the lights flickering, too. She softens her gaze and looks into Quentin’s eyes before he can look away. “In case I don’t have time to say this in my time, Q, I want you to know… I want you to know you’re more than enough. You already are. Just for being you. You don’t have to try and play hero to prove it.”

“Okay,” Quentin says quietly. A rare smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. Penny can’t recall the last time he’d seen Quentin smile.

“Whatever happens, I’m not gonna let you die alone,” Julia tells him. “Because I’d rather live in a world where the Beast is still running free if it means you’re still here.”

_Penny knew that having magic back wasn’t enough for Julia. She had enrolled at Brakebills again a month after Quentin’s wake to try and rediscover herself as a magician. Julia didn’t stay on campus unless she had to. Every night, she’d slip back into Marina’s place at midnight after the Brakebills library had closed, a stack of new books in hand. Penny would stay up and watch her study until sunrise, watch her flood her mind with knowledge so she didn’t have to think about anything else._

_In his timeline, Kady had been the person Fogg had removed from the Brakebills equation. He’d never seen her, and he wondered how differently things might have gone if Kady was there. This time Julia had been the variable, and it had made her miserable. Penny used to think being at Brakebills would’ve fixed things for this version of Julia. Made her happy, even. But it was never about the magic itself. Quentin’s final gift to her would never make up for what she’d lost because she would sacrifice all of it in a heartbeat to bring him back._

“Do you know how good this feels?” Julia asks them. The lights around the Tesla fraction are fading now. Her silhouette is blurring at the edge like she’s a projection gradually zooming out of focus. “Seeing both of you here? Knowing that one day, we can all outlive the Beast?”

A look of guilt crosses Quentin’s eyes. He turns away before Julia can notice. Penny knows Quentin doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he’s not really alive anymore. That he had survived the Beast but sacrificed his life trying to take down someone much worse.

“I have to go,” Julia says. “This is goodbye.”

Penny swallows back the lump in his throat. “I love you, Julia.”

“I love you, too.” She gives Penny one last look. “Always will. Even if I don’t remember.”

Penny finds himself back in Lipson’s office when Julia vanishes from view, a bewildered Kady standing in front of him. She opens her mouth to ask a question but stops herself when she notices the way he’s shaking. Penny throws the door open and storms out of the room without looking back. It’s only when he’s halfway down the hall, Kady following silently behind, that he remembers Quentin. 

He finds Quentin standing in front of him when he projects again, conveying all the words he can’t say with one look. Something about Quentin feels different than the one he saw before the Tesla fraction pulled them both in. Penny can’t put his finger on why, exactly.

“Give me until midnight,” Quentin decides. “If I haven’t figured out how to get myself all the way back by then, I’ll come to find you, and you can tell Julia.”

“Alright,” Penny says. He disappears from the astral plane for a few seconds and relays Quentin’s words to Kady, who frowns but doesn’t argue. “Don’t do anything stupid,” Penny adds when he jumps back into the astral plane once more. 

“I’m gonna find Alice. I know where she is,” Quentin says.

“How are you gonna talk to her?”

“Well.” Quentin smiles for the second time that day. “I was hoping you can?”

Penny rolls his eyes but can’t help chuckling at the irony. Quentin Coldwater, asking for his help? If this isn’t a life or death situation, he’d never have let the loser live it down.

“Fine. Just this once,” Penny says. _For Julia._

“Just this once,” Quentin promises. “I’m gonna go now. But…can you, maybe, give me a few minutes alone?”

“Go,” Penny says. “I’ll find you in a bit.”

An aura of purple light envelopes Quentin’s form as he closes his eyes tight to try and will himself away. The hair on Penny’s arms prickles at the sight of the eerie glow. The light ripples around Quentin’s silhouette in waves until it gathers around Quentin’s upper body. It shape-shifts until it settles into claw marks across Quentin’s chest, into smoldering gashes of light cutting through the cover of his dark shirt. 

Penny reaches out to grab Quentin, trying to stop him before he can vanish. His hand brushes against Quentin’s shoulder instead of phasing through. But before Penny can shout out a warning, Quentin is gone.


	4. Where the Fire Glows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alice is on edge. Quentin re-discovers hot chocolate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M STILL HERE! I was wondering why this chapter took twice as long as the last. Last night I finally checked the word count, and... 8,800 words. Oops? 
> 
> Thank you all for bearing with me. I appreciate each and every one of you :)

**** **_Alice_ **

_They hid in the History of Ancient Europe section out of eyeshot from Mrs. Medina. In one minute, the librarian would get up from her desk and go on her usual round, leaving Alice and Charlie to wander about in the grown-ups section undisturbed. Alice sat next to her brother on the ground and leaned back, her pink backpack sandwiched between her body and the heavy shelf behind her._

_The carpeted floor smelled like it hadn’t met a vacuum in months. Alice crinkled her nose and shrugged, shifting the straps of her heavy school bag away from the sore spots they’d dug into her shoulder. Fourth grade was a lot tougher than the third. Dad had given her a new bag to keep all her new books and a silver horse keychain hanging from the side zipper as a finishing touch. The keychain in question caught the light as Alice turned her head to look at it, grinning at the way her reflection warped around the surface of the horse’s mane._

_When Alice turned back, Charlie gave her a nod. “She’s gone,” he whispered, a grin on his face._

_Children were allowed in all sections of the West Town Branch so long as they were seen but not heard, but the book Alice and Charlie were looking for wasn’t any old book. The book had a secret that dad apparently uncovered earlier this morning over breakfast. He’d sworn after he cast a spell and read what was revealed, then shut the book before either of them could take a peek, and ran out the back door, muttering something about missing the train._

_Which made them all the more curious to see it for themselves._

_Charlie had remembered the serial number on the cover before dad had taken off with the book in hand, so it wasn’t hard to find. It was on the same shelf they were hiding behind. With a sly grin, Charlie retrieved the book on tip-toes and peeled off the decoy cover along with the plastic jacket to reveal a black leather-bound book with a gold-embossed title across the front and a round seal of a lizard curled up in a spiral on the bottom right corner._ Victoria sequuntur somnia.

_“_ The Victory of Nightmares _,” he translated._

_Alice’s eyes brightened. She took the book from him and hugged it gently against her chest with both hands. “Magic?”_

_“Magic,” Charlie confirmed. “Dad did an unmasking spell—I’m gonna find out which one.”_

_They left the library with that book tucked away in Alice’s backpack before Mrs. Medina could come back from her round. They’d left the decoy cover with the barcode back on the shelf and shoved a copy of_ The World in the Walls _inside it to hold the book’s place. The stolen book was hidden in their attic as soon as they’d gotten home._

_They didn’t touch it again until the following Thursday when dad had gone away to a seminar, and Stephanie had a party in the living room in the dead of night. They were celebrating Lupercalia. Alice could tell by the sound of laughing and slurring and cackling downstairs that Stephanie’s guests had drunk too much of that mulled wine she’d concocted down in the basement with her own made-up spells earlier that day._

_Alice would have slept through it all if it weren’t for the thunder._

_She’d hidden in the attic hoping the thunderstorm would pass in an hour or two, and that was when she remembered the book. Using the attic as a hideout was Charlie’s idea. Most of their grown-up visitors didn’t fit through the little trapdoor on top of the ladder, and the few who did weren’t particularly tempted to try. A small skylight sat on top of the roof, making this the perfect place to read. Sometimes it felt like the sun stayed up longer for them, saving a few more rays of sunlight after the entire city had been bathed in the sunset._

_“Thought I’d find you here.”_

_Charlie peeked his head through the opening of the trapdoor before climbing in and closing it shut below him. He was holding another book, one bound with what looked like green parchment. Alice lay on her stomach on the little blue rug they’d taken from Stephanie’s shelf in the garage, propping her head up with both hands._ The Victory of Nightmares _was open in front of her. She squinted at the words inside underneath the little light bulb that hung on a string halfway down the roof._

_“I can’t sleep,” Alice explained._

_“I figured.” Charlie sat cross-legged by her side as she scooted over on the rug. He laid his book down next to the one Alice was reading. “Good news. I found dad’s book.”_

_“The one with the unmasking spell?”_

_“Yup. Maadawi’s Unmasking.” Charlie leaned forward and flipped to the right page. “Did you know his study’s not actually locked? The spell on the door’s fake. He thinks we can’t tell.”_

_Alice smiled. She didn’t know, but Charlie always did. It was good to be on his side, one step ahead of their parents._

_It took Charlie three tries before purple ink began to bloom over the black words on the page. The cursive words spread out like spider webs until all the text ran over the original words on the page. In the middle was a sketch of a dark purple beast. The beast had three barbed tails, wings of bats, a body of an elephant, and the face of a cheetah. It snarled at Alice as she leaned in for a closer look, raising its talon. On the ground beneath its feet were claw marks, deep gashes with a glowing purple substance oozing from inside. “The Shadowraith,” the title said._

_Thunder struck outside the moment Alice noticed the crackles of lightning in the beast’s eyes. She startled. Charlie lowered himself so he was lying by her side on the carpet and put his arm around her, pulling her close._

_“We’re magicians, you and I,” he said. “One day we’ll cast a spell to make lightning go away.”_

_They took turns reading the purple words out loud and tried to remember everything: Shadowraiths weren’t born from shadows, despite their name. They were Beings made from the beginning of time that couldn’t be killed but were never really alive; lurkers between the mortal world and the afterlife, feasting on stragglers in-between life and eternity. Their number one fear was fire. And they couldn’t touch humans at all unless a once-mortal who had defied death chose to unleash the Shadowraiths with their blood. The author hadn’t left their name. Only a signature._ “M.C.”

_“Charlie,” Alice had asked as she’d turned to lie on her back, her hand fidgeting with the fraying yarn at the edge of the rug they were on. “Do you think anyone’s gonna try and bring Shadowraiths to Earth?”_

_“It’s gotta be near-impossible,” Charlie said. “I haven’t heard of anyone who’d died halfway. Not humans. Either we’re here in the physical plane, or we’re gone for good. Death always claims its victims.”_

_They had fallen asleep up in the attic that night. At dawn, Charlie hid the book underneath a loose tile before they snuck back into their rooms and crawled in bed. Stephanie didn’t notice anything amiss when she’d gotten out of bed an hour later to wake them up for school, the bitter sting of last night’s mulled wine wafting through the air wherever she walked. After school Alice and Charlie climbed into their hideout again, hoping to take a gander at the other beasts in this book, only to find the skylight had been cracked open from the outside. The book was gone._

The flame from the candle Alice’s is the only source of light in the dark room. Papers catch on fire too easily, but Alice misses the flame. The silver handle on the candle dish grows warm in her hand. She balances it precariously, careful not to let hot wax drip over one side. In her other hand is the book she’d taken off its shelf five weeks ago.

Alice only comes into the revision room during the after-hours. Most of the Librarians who worked here had survived the Monsters’ attack, an advantage of being tucked away in a hidden space unknown to most visitors. They didn’t know what to make of the new Head Librarian, and Alice had, for the most part of her employment, locked herself away in her office instead of making an impression, sorting through inventories of books that had gone missing after the Monsters’ rampage. 

Thunder echoes through the high ceiling, rattling the hinges around the skylight. It feels like one bolt of lightning can send the glass shattering down, but it’s quiet in this room compared to the raging storm outside, so it’s proving itself to be an adequate shelter. The revision room is entirely different from what Alice remembered the last time she’d come in. This time there’s no clicking from the typewriters working themselves into prophecies, no papers shuffling around, piling themselves into stacks to be bound. All the biography revisions from today lay on their desks with the name of the person facing up, arranged in alphabetical order from row to row.

No revision for Quentin Coldwater.

Alice sets the candle dish on one table and opens Quentin’s biography in her hand for the thirteenth time today. Most of the book had been left unread, so she flips through the text as quickly as she can. It seemed too personal to pry into Quentin’s past to complete her perception of him, too unfair when he can’t make decisions in his future to amend any of that. The last page is precisely the same as before. She makes herself turn the page before she can see the dreaded last few words: _This ends the story of Quentin Coldwater._

It wasn’t Quentin’s ending that made Alice keep his book around her person instead of filed away at the rightful shelf ( _Biographies, Earth, Deceased_ ). It’s what comes after. It’s the many blank pages that follow after that last line, pages without hidden words—none that she can reveal with any unmasking spell, anyway. It feels like Quentin’s story had ended earlier than it was meant to, but no one, not even the strange ancient horomancy that powers this room, can explain where Quentin could have gone. Where he _should_ have gone.

There has to be something else. There has to be.

The swooshing sound behind her gives her a jolt. A brown bunny lands on the table right next to a pile of revisions for someone named _Clarice Howard_ , his little nose twitching as he takes in the sight of Alice lurking in the dark with a single candle. It’s the same bunny as last time. The same one Margo’s been using for three months now. Alice recognizes the spot of white just below its left ear.

“Something real fishy’s going on down here, Bookworm,” the bunny says, relaying every word Margo had told him. “Demon possessions. Shades going missing. Dig up whatever you can find on Shadowraiths, or Spitegolems, or any of the other motherfuckers I told you about last time. I’ll send Twenty-Three up there tomorrow and see what you got.”

The bunny looks Alice in the eye when he finishes speaking. She stares back vacantly without saying anything else and forces herself to nod. He vanishes in his portal without question. Margo must’ve bribed him enough for a two-way trip.

Shadowraiths. 

Alice hadn’t thought about them in a while, not since she’d been brought back from her death as a Niffin. Those were the monsters that haunted Alice in her sleep when she was a child. She’d known magic was real already, and from there, Shade-snatching Beings born in the nether plane hadn’t been all that much of a leap. But Margo was the last person Alice expected to bring up Shadowraiths. Unless—

There’s been an upsurge in possessions on Earth recently. Margo had been sorting those out with Kady. Besides the bunny messengers that would show up daily with news from New York, Margo had also made sure to give Alice an update every time they finished another battle. Alice had responded in kind, offering speculations that, up until now, had been barely helpful. But missing Shades is a whole new lead. Alice hadn’t known those were the types of monsters they were dealing with.

_The Shadowraiths had found Alice too quickly after Quentin had set her free. They’d crept up behind her silently; she’d heard them growl before she turned around and saw the lightning in their eyes. As a Niffin no longer alive, Shadowraiths, somehow, still reminded her of death._

_The reminder was enough reason for Alice to run, even though she knew Niffins can’t be killed a second time. She could feel their breaths hot on her heels. The nearest Shadowraith clawed at her chest, only for its talon to go right through her. She wondered, then, if they had tried to pursue Charlie the same way back when he was dead and running free._

_Alice willed herself away, thinking of nothing but fire. She found herself standing in a room full of burning candles, surrounded by cloaked magicians in the middle of a Samhain ritual. They didn’t see Alice, but she stayed there until their candles had stopped burning. Until she was certain the Shadowraiths wouldn’t follow._

_She always followed fire when she traveled after that, and not just to keep the beasts at bay. Fire had a way of refracting the light around it, shifting little fragments of its surroundings in more ways than her old human eyes could have ever seen, and eventually, she grew used to seeing the world that way, dancing alongside the flickering flames._

Thunder strikes again, catching Alice by surprise as she thinks about Shadowraiths for the first time in months. She jerks back at the clap of thunder, and her leg bumps against the nearby table where she’d set down her candle dish. The table tips over and lands with a loud _thud_. The stack of revisions slips off the surface and hits the ground, scattering paper everywhere. Alice reaches out to catch the candle dish with Quentin’s book still in hand. The dish tips over when it makes contact with the book, and hot wax drips all over it, making it sizzle. 

In a panic, Alice shrieks and drops everything: the book, the burning candle… all of it onto the mess of paper across the floor. The silver cable dish makes a dull clatter when it hits the papers on the ground, and the candle falls out of the dish and rolls around, lighting everything on fire, even the corner of Quentin’s book which lay on top of everything.

“No!” she cries out, “no no no no no…”

An alarm blares at the same time another round of thunder hits. Water sprays down from the ceiling at the hint of smoke, soaking every piece of paper around Alice as she drops to the ground and covers her ears. When the thunder stops, she scrambles her way over to look for Quentin’s book in the near-darkness, running her hand through piles and piles of soggy paper. 

She needs to do something about the water before Quentin’s book is ruined all the way through. What would Quentin have done? She tries to remember how he used to fix things. It was all a matter of deliberation, wasn’t it? It was all about imagining the object mending its way back to how it was seconds ago. She raises her hands slowly, palms facing up, and imagines the water rising up into vapors, leaving the ground dry. 

Nothing happens. 

“Please,” Alice whispers, choking back a sob. “Please. Come on!”

Nothing’s working. Nothing ever works when she tries to fix something. Alice can master every discipline in existence—and she _had_ , she had attempted them _all_ when she was a Niffin—but minor mending is the one thing she always fucks up And now is no exception, even if one simple spell could’ve saved this fucking book. 

“Fuck!”

Alice swipes her hands over the fallen pages and begs for the book to reveal itself, but all she touches is more soaked-up paper. The revisions. Not the book. There are hints of moonlight from the skylight, but not enough for her to find anything. The book’s buried in the pile somewhere by now, black ink smudging through the pages, no doubt.

A scream escapes Alice’s mouth before she can stop herself. No one can hear her in here. The revision room’s much too well-hidden, and she’s alone, and at the thought of the mess she’d made, she lets herself break down for the first time in months. Her sobs echo around the room, up to the high roof—high enough to reach the glass skylight, where she sees another bolt of lightning strikes across the clouds—and back down again. 

Through her tear-blurred eyes and smudged lenses of her glasses, Alice sees Quentin’s book hover its way over to her and start to mend itself. Ripped pages glide their ways back to the book, which had opened itself up, suspended by nothing. With the spine exposed, everything falls back into place and stitches together once more. A few seconds later, the book is as good as it once was.

Warm air washes over Alice as everything dries up. More scattered papers from the ground rise into the air, shuffling themselves back into a neat pile on top of the straightened-out desk. The room is back to order now, neat and tidy as it once was minutes ago before Alice had gotten herself into a jump scare and fucked everything up.

Alice notices an eerie purple glow before she makes out the source of it. A small boy stands in front of her with his palms turned upwards. The mended book is hovering its way slowly back to him. His magic ripples around the room like an invisible force field, lifting the ends of the soft brown hair that gently brushes against his shoulders. 

She hadn’t heard the boy come in. Maybe he was here all along, watching. Perhaps he only made himself visible when she wanted to give up. 

Memories awaken in Alice’s mind when their eyes meet, memories of the friend she had lost. Memories of the way Quentin’s eyes crinkled and his lips curled into the most secretive little smile whenever she let him show her a card trick. Alice always liked watching his sleight-of-hand tricks, even the ones that weren’t meant for her, but Eliot or Margo, or whoever else happened to be downstairs at the Physical Cottage on a weekday night.

“Alice,” the boy says. His voice stirs up an echo inside her chest, close to the place where her Shade is resting.

“Quentin?” Alice asks, feeling her voice tense. “Is that you?”

The boy whimpers in pain before he can give her an answer, clutching his chest. Now that Alice takes a closer look, she realizes the purple light emanating from him is not an aura. It’s the gashes on his chest that make him glow, giant claw marks oozing a sickening slime of something sick and poisonous. 

Alice stands and runs over just fast enough to catch the boy when he falls. He collapses in her arms as the gashes across his chest spread wider. She holds her hand across his wound, whispering spell after spell, trying to make the pain stop even though she recognizes where these claw marks had come from. Even though she knows nothing in the physical plane can prevent the boy from being torn apart.

The boy’s eyes are brimming with tears when he looks at her and grabs hold of her hand. Alice feels the heaviness inside her own chest begin to dissipate like he’s crying her tears in her place, taking her own pain away. She realizes what the boy must be.

“Please,” Quentin’s Shade whispers. “I—I don’t… wanna go.”

Someone lands with a clatter a few feet behind her and swears. Alice turns around, still holding her hand tightly around the Shade’s chest. A bewildered Penny is standing there, his left hand powering a Stellwagen’s Orb that’s beginning to dim. He sees Alice and runs over, lowering himself to look the boy in the eye. 

“Took me-took me forever to—” Penny pauses to catch his breath, hovering the orb over the boy’s pale face—“I thought you’d—thought you’d be in your—your—office. Took me a while— _Fuck_.” He looks down at the state of Quentin’s Shade. Recognition flickers across his eyes. “Never mind. Shit. What do we do?”

Alice looks around the room for answers, but no prophecy here is about Quentin. She breathes in slowly and turns back to the boy in her arms, the Shade of the man who had brought her back to life. She can’t let Quentin die on her like this—not after she and Penny had run away from Quentin last time they were together, leaving him shattered in the Mirror Realm from the refractions of his own spell. 

“Mayakovsky,” she decides. “We need to get to Brakebills South.”

By a sheer stroke of luck, Penny lands them right into Mayakovsky’s sitting room. The professor in question is sitting by the fireplace, nursing a bourbon straight from the bottle. At the sight of his two former students and the Shade, he rolls his eyes. “You again.”

All Alice can do is nod. One month after she’d taken over the Library, she had asked Fogg to gather up the Brakebills staff for a favor. With Penny’s help, they’d headed to Brakebills South and unraveled the botched-up spell that had left Mayakovsky in his confounded state. They had traveled themselves away before the professor could wake up. It was the least Alice could do, considering Mayakovsky had helped bring her back to life once, but she didn’t want to stay long enough to explain why Quentin didn’t come back with her, too.

Mayakovsky crouches down by the carpet where Quentin’s Shade is lying. He mutters something unintelligible as he examines the claw marks on the boy’s chest and the bright purple from underneath. “Shadowraiths,” he says finally.

He goes away before Alice can ask how he knew where the claw marks had come from. A few seconds later he returns with a black pouch. “Your hand,” he tells Alice.

Alice shows Mayakovsky her left hand. He retrieves something from the pouch, a switchblade, and before Alice can pull away, he grabs her wrist tight and slices the blade across her palm. 

“What the hell!” Penny shouts. 

Mayakovsky ignores him. He turns Alice’s hand over as she hisses in pain and pushes it down against the deep gashes on Quentin’s Shade’s chest. There’s a strange tingling sensation in her veins like her hand is a magnet and she’s drawing something away from the wounds. A few seconds later, the purple glow stops. Mayakovsky lets go of her hand. She pulls away and sees the claw marks across the Shade’s chest have sealed up, leaving nothing but three faint scars and smears of her blood.

“Fix her up,” Mayakovsky says, tossing Penny the rest of his pouch. He looks at the Shade again. “And let him sleep.”

Penny takes Alice’s hand and cleans up her wound before dressing it and wrapping the bandages in a practiced fashion. She winces but doesn’t say anything, only gives him a small nod of thanks when he’s finished.

“Gateway to physical plane is closed same way it opens,” Mayakovsky explains, gesturing at the Shade’s unconscious form. “Whoever summoned Shadowraiths was not only person to have defied rules of death, Alice Quinn.”

“Wait a minute, gateway?” Penny asks, looking at Quentin’s shade. “Gateway to the physical plane? Was he attacked by one of those monsters too?”

“Monsters?” Mayakovsky gives Penny a questioning look.

“Lipson found something about these monsters we’ve been fighting. These monsters that were possessing people around Earth. She called Kady and me into her office earlier,” Penny explains. “Showed us a book about Spitegolems. And we fought Shadowraiths earlier today. They’re one of those, too? Shade-snatchers?”

Mayakovsky stands up, looking thoughtful. “Beings from nether plane? Yes. They all come after being summoned by mortal who defied death. They run around Earth now? Making absolute shit show?”

“Yeah. More than usual, apparently.”

“Fuck,” Mayakovsky says. He looks at Penny. “Leave, Traveler. Find your friends. Catch whoever has been unleashing Nether Beings before everything goes to shit.”

“But we don’t know who it is,” Alice points out. 

“Years ago, I stumbled upon book called _Victory of Nightmares_ ,” Mayakovsky says. “There was a chapter—hidden chapter—about Shadowraiths.”

Alice turns sharply. “ _You’ve_ read that book too?”

“I was tracking it. Heard rumor from hedges that someone who defied death was looking. What for, I don’t want to know. Tracked it all the way to Chicago back in early 2000s. Had to break into someone’s house to take it. I used it as bait to lure summoner to my office at Brakebills, but none came. So I let it go. But I found hidden notes, one small chapter about Shadowraiths. Top secret. Signed by author.”

“ _M.C._ ,” Alice finishes.

“You know the book?”

“It was _my_ house you broke into back in Chicago.”

Mayakovsky snorts. “Small world. Go find your friends,” he addresses Penny again. “Find that book—I gave it to woman named Harriet. Used to own website called Fuzzbeat—don’t know where to find her now.”

“I know Harriet,” Penny says. “I can find her.”

“Good.” Mayakovsky waves him off. “Find Harriet. Find the book. After you have the book, find this _M.C.—_ either they brought back Nether Beings, or they may know who did.”

“How are we supposed to find this guy?”

“I have to tell you everything?” Mayakovsky sighs. “Fuck’s sake. You learned tracking spell?”

“Right. Yeah. I know a few.”

“Then leave.”

After Penny rolls his eyes and travels back to New York, Alice lowers herself next to Quentin’s Shade again. The boy is lying perfectly still, but she can see his chest rise and fall, and she smiles in relief. The color is returning to his cheeks now that his wounds have healed. 

“Is not sustainable form,” Mayakovsky points out. “Shade cannot stay in physical plane longer than one day by itself.”

“I know,” Alice says, meeting his eyes. “I was—I was wondering if—”

“I have material for new body,” Mayakovsky cuts her off. “I hope this is last time you will ask. You two—always you two. Do not get yourselves killed again. You come back once, is dumb luck. You come back twice, is fucking with Underworld. They will not be happy.”

“Thank you.” Alice stands up. “Really. I—thank you. Thank you so much. Can I help?”

“I had hoped you would ask.” Mayakovsky walks out of the sitting room, leaving the door propped open. Alice brushes a hand against the boy’s forehead gently and gives him one last look before she follows. “We find my books, build his body together, and you learn. Yes?”

◊

**_Quentin_ **

Everything is louder in the quiet. Quentin can hear the crackling of flames in the fireplace, and the droplets of snow that patter against the window as the wind hits. His consciousness is roaming outside of his new body watching two versions of himself. There’s the grown man, dressed in an old Brakebills sweatshirt with the good old bee and key print in the center and a pair of jeans someone else must’ve owned once. And then there’s the Shade, the little boy in his old school uniform, lying on the ground like someone had pulled him away from an old photograph that sat on his dad’s mantelpiece.

Quentin watches Mayakovsky and Alice cast the final spell to place the Shade into his new body. Alice’s left hand is bandaged up, and a drop of blood seeps through the crease of the gauze as she mirrors every hand gesture the professor is making, their lips moving at the same time as they chant. Quentin’s Shade levitates above ground until it’s hovering right on top of his new body before they let it down. Quentin’s adult form is large enough that the Shade disappears inside entirely. He doesn’t remember ever being that small.

The Shadow Being had come so close to ripping the Shade apart, but the little boy had held his own. Quentin’s Shade was stronger than he believed, strong enough that his chest had ached with grief at the sight of Eliot even when he had no form. Quentin knows now that it was the child inside of him that had fixed the book Alice broke and shielded Margo and Kady from the Shadow Being. Quentin’s Shade had forced him back into the physical plane, slowly but surely, dragging his consciousness by the heel. 

Quentin doesn’t know when the Shade had appeared or if it ever left. It hadn’t made itself visible until Quentin had been forced out of the Tesla fraction after saying goodbye to Julia Twenty-Three. He wanted to see a Julia who survived, instead of a time-warped fragment of her—he didn’t need a Shade to tell him that much.

At the thought of Julia, the Shade inside Quentin’s new body glows. It’s not the purple glow that nearly killed it from inside. This time it’s a white light that washes over the entirety of his new corporeal form like some sort of aura, flickering like a flashing signal. Like it’s calling for the last part of him to come home.

Quentin is slumped against a chair next to the fireplace in the same sitting room when he wakes up in his new body, a shearling blanket draped over him from shoulder to toe. Outside it’s chilly enough for the window to frost over, clouding his view to the plateaus of snow he remembers from his last visit here. When he tries to move, the blanket slips off one of his shoulders, and he winces as the cold air hits.

He sees Alice from the corner of his eyes and turns to look. Alice is sitting by his side, watching him from where she’s perched on a stool, a red mug of some kind of warm drink in her good hand. At the sight of him shivering, she walks over to the fireplace and places her drink on top of the mantlepiece.

Alice kneels in front of the five to make the flame rise, guiding it up into the chimney through the rise of her hands. One of the sparks jumps high enough to give her a pause, but she continues her casting. She whispers some kind of spell that Quentin can’t hear, but he feels the wave of warmth washing over the whole room, forcing the cold away.

Quentin is shivering from the heat now rather than the cold. Fire grows stronger in the thick of the Antarctic than it does anywhere else, too stubborn to let itself be extinguished by the wind. Quentin had noticed this the first time he was here, and every visit he’d paid after that had reaffirmed the observation. Mayakovsky’s place had become a way station for Quentin and Alice, but everything here makes him feel strange right now. His mind had known exactly what to expect, but his body’s experiencing it for the first time. 

It’s full circle, isn’t it? This was the place Alice had been when Quentin had brought her back. Now it’s his turn.

“How do you feel?” Alice asks. 

It takes Quentin three seconds to process what she just said. Voices in the physical plane have an echo he hadn’t noticed in the astral plane. It makes spoken words a little hard to catch, especially when it’s dark in the room except for fire that he can’t read her lips. In response Quentin pulls up the blanket around him again, sighing in content when it covers his exposed shoulder, shrouding himself in a cocoon. 

“I-I can feel again,” he says slowly, testing his voice. His vocal cord tickles a little, but it doesn’t hurt. “A whole lot of things. The cold, especially.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

This time Alice’s voice registers a little more easily. He nods. Pauses. Then frowns. “Are you supposed to forget?”

“That’s how it was for me. Memories slipping away,” Alice says. “But I was different. I was forced all the way back.”

“Yeah. I-uhh, sorry about that.” 

Quentin quirks an eyebrow, surprised to hear Alice chuckle. She shrugs.

“I used to wonder,” Alice continues, watching the glow of the roaring fire as she turns away from him, “I used to wonder if I should be happy to be brought back. If I should be grateful to you for doing all this. But I couldn’t bring myself to feel good about it, not when I didn’t even remember what being alive meant. 

“I was furious at first because I remembered being a Niffin. Being free to go anywhere, even back to the first moment in time. To know everything there is to know whatever I wanted. I was already gone. No more feelings. And it felt like I’d never had feelings to begin with. Like I was always just pure magic, no human. 

“And you know what, Q? I was fine with all that ‘till my Shade pulled me all the way back here, and trapped me back into this body, and made me remember what it was like to be the old Alice. Then everything I’d lost started coming back to me. Everything.”

“What about now?” Quentin asks, leaning forward. The blanket slips off his shoulder again, so he pulls it off completely and folds and tucks it behind his back. The cold’s not as unbearable as the first time, but he still bites back a shiver. “Are you happy to be back now?”

She meets his eyes again, the lenses of her glasses glaring as they catch the light from the fire. “I don’t know. I can’t tell if I only feel happy now because I think I should be happy. But my Shade’s back, and whatever I’m feeling—whatever it is—it’s a lot different from feeling nothing. I don’t mind this anymore. I don’t wanna lose this.”

Quentin’s heart is pounding now. It’s beating so loudly he can barely hear himself speak. He’s only noticing his heartbeats now that he has stopped shivering, but he doesn’t feel the Shade forcing itself back into his body, not in the way Alice describes. Maybe his Shade had always been with him, even in death. It must’ve followed him when he’d gone into the Underworld because it was with him he’d first stepped out of the gateway after talking to Penny. It was with him when he saw Eliot and Margo.

“Are Shades always supposed to leave?” Quentin asks.

“After you die?” Alice thinks about it. “I thought they go down into the Underworld. Shades end up in Elysium when they leave the body of their host. You and Julia went there to look for her Shade, didn’t you?”

“I think my Shade’s always been here,” he tells her. “I don’t think it ever left me.” 

“How do you mean?”

“You said you couldn’t feel anything after you died,” he explains. “But I always felt something. Even when I was—here, or, not entirely here, but somewhere around Earth—even when I had no form.”

“You were here?” Alice frowns. “But without a form? Where were you?”

“I don’t know. But I was… I saw a lot of things. I guess I was on Earth, but I wasn’t—I was somewhere here, but everywhere I look, I learn something I couldn’t have ever known. Like something I wasn’t supposed to know. I could see magic floating around. Spells. Even the ones that someone had cast a long time ago, the ones that wore off.”

“You were in the knowledge plane,” Alice says immediately. “That’s exactly what the world looked like to me as a Niffin. And you’re not wrong about being on Earth. It’s parallel to the physical plane.”

“Parallel?” Quentin asks. “Like where the fairies used to live? Or the astral plane?”

“You can think of it that way,” Alice says. “Time flows the same in the astral plane as it does in the physical. The fairy realm operates on a different time flow. And the knowledge plane is a form of life after death, but it’s also a bridge between the afterlife and the world of the living. That’s why there’s a way to bring a Niffin back—they don’t have an eternity to go to, so they’re still around. In their own way.”

“That’s where I was? I don’t get it. I wasn’t a Niffin.”

“The knowledge plane is where people end up if there’s a magical anomaly that caused their death. I learned about this when I was a Niffin. Your death would’ve been a gray area. You cast a spell in the mirror world, and all the refractions ripped you apart. But your magic was destroyed along with it, too. So… not exactly a Niffin. But still.”

Was his magic really gone for good? Quentin thinks about the mending he just did back in the Library, stitching the seam of the book back together, drying up the pages soaked through with water. He hadn’t been thinking about casting a spell when it happened. He hadn’t thought about using magic at all.

“I was in the Underworld first,” Quentin tells Alice. “I didn’t jump right into the knowledge plane. I was all the way dead. I saw Penny. Our Penny. He opened the gateway for me to go into my eternity. And it brought me back here.”

“Did Penny tell you what the gateway does?”

“God, I don’t remember.” Quentin puts his face in his hands and breathes in slowly. “It’s… It’s supposed to take people to where they were meant to be. Whatever that means.”

“Maybe you weren’t meant to have died so soon.”

“So the gateway took me back?”

“Maybe the gateway couldn’t decide. So it put you in the knowledge plane to see if you’d find your own way, wherever you were meant to be.”

And the gateway took him back here. Against all the odds, Quentin had slipped through one plane, then the other, sometimes in-between until he was back where he’d started.

“It was a pretty long way back,” Quentin says. “I was in the knowledge plane for… it felt like for a few hours? A few days? But Penny told me it’s been six months. And some things don’t add up. When I was in the knowledge plane, I saw Margo. She was talking about Spitegolems.”

“They fought Spitegolems eight weeks ago.”

“Exactly. And when I was in the desert earlier, they were fighting Shadowraiths.”

“Shadowraiths?” Alice stops him before he can go on. “You were there?”

“One of those beasts tackled me. Scratched me, too. I didn’t feel anything—I thought I was fine. I just—I thought they were going after Margo, and I panicked.”

“You could’ve gotten yourself hurt, or worse,” Alice says. “Again. You would’ve been killed a second time if Penny and I hadn’t seen you. Q, you have to stop doing this to yourself.”

It’s dark in this room. Thankfully. Quentin can’t get himself to look at Alice knowing she’s right. Why does he keep getting himself into this kind of mess? 

He hadn’t been thinking about getting himself killed when he’d tackled the Shadow Being. Every act of self-sacrifice was done because he didn’t want his friends to suffer. All heart. No logic. Could it be his Shade again? Could it be that the very thing that got him killed also gave him a second chance at life?

“I was alone,” Quentin confesses. “And they thought they’d gotten rid of the Shadowraiths. But they only got rid of one part of them. I was the only one who could see those beasts in the astral plane, or wherever they were. I didn’t know what else to do.”

Quentin can see Alice nod. She’s watching him without blinking like he can slip away at any moment. “Well,” Alice says, “maybe you shouldn’t be alone.”

“I could say the same for you.” He can tell back at the Library that the isolation was getting to Alice. Perhaps this new quest to hunt down the monster-summoner with their friends is precisely what they both need. “How’s your hand?”

Alice crosses her arms, pressing firmly into a thin line. For a second it looks like she’s gonna reprimand him for caring more about a knife cut than his actual death. But the second passes, and she bursts out laughing instead. Quentin follows, welcoming the tension in his chest he hadn’t felt in a long time.

“I’ll live, I’m sure,” Alice finally manages to say.

“As will I,” Quentin quips back. “Thanks to you.”

“Don’t make a habit of it.”

“I won’t. I don’t think Mayakovsky’s gonna be pleased if we try this again.”

“He’ll find a dragon and send us back down to the Underworld himself,” Alice agrees.

“She’s right,” Mayakovsky says behind them. They turn as the lights around the room turn on, making the place painfully bright. Mayakovsky is standing at the archway leading to the rest of the house. He shoots daggers at them with his glare like he’s still their professor and they had just failed to mind-control a swarm of bees. “You die half-cocked again, you come here for help, I kill you properly. Understand?”

Quentin and Alice nod before turning to each other with a shared smile. Something tells Quentin they’d be a little more careful with their lives now. Especially him.

“I give you more time,” Mayakovsky points at the watch on his wrist. “Portal to Brakebills opens midnight in New York. You know where to find it.”

Mayakovsky leaves before either of them can say another word. Alice leaves her seat and retrieves the mug she’d placed on the mantlepiece earlier. She stands in front of him and offers him her injured hand.

“Midnight,” Quentin mutters. He takes her by the arm, avoiding the bandage, and pulls himself up, swaying a little as he finds his footing. “Right. Shit.”

“What?”

“I have to find Julia before midnight. I told Penny not to say anything unless I’m not back by then. That’s why I was there at the Library. I was looking for you.”

“You think I could’ve helped?”

“I figured you’d know more about this than anyone else,” he says. 

Alice doesn’t hide her smile as she takes a swig from her mug. She emerges a few seconds later with a smudge of whipped cream on her nose, then offers the mug to Quentin. “It’s still warm. Want some?”

“Is that hot chocolate?”

“I know we should start with something bland, but it’s chocolate.”

“Alright. Why not.” 

Quentin takes the mug from Alice and closes his hand around it. The heat makes his palm a little numb, but he welcomes it. There must’ve been some kind of enchantment placed over the ceramic to keep the hot chocolate warm. Or maybe it was just the fire. 

He takes a careful sip, bracing himself for an overwhelming rush of flavors. A little taste is enough to make him cringe, but he swallows. The smell of the hot chocolate in his hand taunts him as his stomach protests, begging for more, but he gives it back to Alice. He’s not about to push his luck too far, not when he has the rest of his life to drink whatever he wants.

“I had some hot chocolate in the Underworld,” he tells her, leading her out of the sitting room. “With Penny. It’s the same hot chocolate, but so different.”

“What was Penny doing?” Alice asks, wiping the cream off her nose with her finger.

“He was in charge of confessions. Confessions taken to the grave, so I could tell my truth and move on. So I tried. And he showed me my wake. All of you sitting by the fire.”

Alice stops them in the middle of the room where they untied all the knots from the magically-bound ropes only weeks ago. “You were there?”

“I was there,” Quentin admits. “I saw all of you. Penny said it was supposed to help me move on, whatever that meant. I didn’t know how that was supposed to make me feel better. I didn’t want that to be the last time I saw you.”

“Your Shade was with you the whole time?”

“Must’ve been,” Quentin says. “I don’t know how else it could’ve followed. Alice, do you think maybe Penny knew that too? That I wasn’t ready?”

“I think he knows you well enough.”

Quentin chuckles as Alice takes another sip of her hot chocolate. Doesn’t everyone these days? There are so many things people say about him that he’ll never admit to himself, things he finds hard to believe. It could’ve been the depression. It could be that he ended up in the Underworld because he needed to let go of some of that pain, not because it was the end of the road for him.

“I’ve been wondering why I didn’t go further when I was in the knowledge plane,” Quentin tells Alice, craning his head until he finds the hallway that he knows will lead to the portal. They start walking again. “Time doesn’t flow the same way it does in the physical plane, right?”

“Time flows in all directions in the knowledge plane,” Alice confirms. “Eternity is just eternity. The eternity we have now is the same eternity people who die in the future will live in. There’s no backward and forward when it comes to life after death. Since the knowledge plane is parallel to the physical plane, it means we have the freedom to travel as far back in time or as far into the future as we want.”

“So I could’ve gone anywhere? Anywhere at any time?”

In the antechamber at the end of this hall sits the portrait that will soon become a portal. The foyer is well-lit and strangely welcoming for an institution that’s reputed to be anything but, lined with velvet ottomans and coffee tables around the circular space. Mayakovsky had apparently done some redecorating since the last time Quentin was here as if he was expecting more guests to come through the portal. Alice and Quentin stand in front of the portrait, waiting for the familiar yellow glow behind the frame.

Alice finishes her hot chocolate and sets the mug down on a coffee table. “Pretty hard to wrap your head around, isn’t it? When I was in the knowledge plane, I jumped back thousands and thousands of years to see how the world began. I saw the future, too. I don’t remember much now; I was too busy writing down everything else.”

“I wasn’t that far gone. Just eight weeks. I don’t know why it took me four months to get back here. The gateway must’ve taken a while to push me through.”

“We’re lucky you hadn’t gone that far,” Alice says.

“When walked through the gateway,” Quentin tells her, “I was thinking about the wake, and I was asking myself, _how am I ever gonna move on from that_? Maybe that’s why I stuck around.”

“Your Shade must’ve worked as a tether,” Alice says. “It kept you grounded around our time. I was all burned out when I died; nothing but magic left. My Shade vanished the moment I was gone. But you died with all parts of you, and you came back whole.”

“I’m not too sure about that. My magic’s different.”

“But you fixed your book.”

“I did,” Quentin says. “But I wasn’t thinking about the way I need to move my hands. I wasn’t thinking about putting it back together. I just… I saw you were upset. I wanted to make you feel better. And the book mended itself.”

Alice nods, frowning thoughtfully. “It could be your Shade again.”

“What, small miracles? I thought they only did that down in Elysium.”

“You must’ve found a way to bring that to life, Q,” Alice tells him. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but if anyone could’ve done it, it’s you.”

Quentin smiles. “I like the sound of that.”

They hear footsteps approaching and don’t say anything else. Mayakovsky makes his way down the hall with a bottle of something in hand. Quentin wonders if he can still cast spells, but he doesn’t particularly want to try. Maybe the confessions down in the Underworld was a place where magicians shed away the pain they carried, the one that fueled their spells back when they were alive. And if that’s the case—if Quentin lost his magic but got another chance to see his friends—he thinks he’s gonna be okay.

“Five minutes,” Mayakovsky says. He opens the door to the last room at the end of the hall, one that looks like some kind of personal library. “Come, Quentin Coldwater. One last thing.” 

Alice shakes her head when Quentin catches her eye, silently asking if she wants to come with. Quentin sighs, defeated, but goes in alone without protest. Mayakovsky shuts the door behind him then turns around.

“I, uh,” Quentin mumbles, “thank you. Again. For, you know—”

“I do not get enjoyment from thank you’s,” Mayakovsky cuts him off, waving the half-downed bottle of vodka in his hand. The clear liquid sloshes around inside. “I call you here to offer word of advice.”

“O-okay.”

“I do not bring you back to let you live stupid life.” Mayakovsky jabs a finger at his chest. “Stupid life, because you do not dare convince yourself truth.”

“Truth about what?”

The Classic Mayakovsky Exasperation is back on the professor’s face, a quick huff followed by a glare that screams _oh, you fool_. The familiarity of it all makes Quentin wanna chuckle. Out of all the things he missed about his life, Quentin didn’t think Mayakovsky’s utter disdain would be on the list. But here he is. 

“You are in love,” Mayakovsky says.

“No, I’m—I mean, Alice and I, we’re—”

“Fuck’s sake, not Alice Quinn! Am talking about boy with curly hair. Walks with cane, always with—” Mayakovsky gestures vaguely—“with lady friend.”

_Eliot_. He’s talking about Eliot. 

“He came after your death,” Mayakovsky said. “Him and lady friend. Asked me to bring dead person back to life like I did with Alice Quinn.”

“Eliot and Margo came?”

“They came. She asked as soon as they saw me, very calm. But he? He cried. Begged. Followed me around, pleaded for hours. Asked me to build your new body, like it’s easy, like building house.” Mayakovsky scoffs. “I told him no. Impossible. I cannot. I have battery for energy, but not your consciousness—” he taps the side of his head— "or Shade.”

Quentin opens his mouth, but his mind stops short. No words escape from his parted lips, but his new heart betrays him by beating faster.

“I know love when I see,” Mayakovsky insists, his sharp gaze piercing through the mask Quentin is trying so hard to put on. “He loves you. Fuck knows why. And the look in his eyes when he asked. Hope. Gone when I told him ‘impossible’.” The professor snaps his fingers with his free hand. “Like that.”

“I… I should go,” Quentin manages to say.

Mayakovsky is already walking past him, throwing his door open. “Go on. After you.”

Alice gives Quentin a questioning look when he joins her at the portal again, watching the yellow glow flicker from behind the portrait’s frame. Quentin gives her a smile, feeling his heart quickening and pounding against his ribs. He takes a few slow breaths, willing himself to calm down. Being back in a human body is… to say overwhelming would be an understatement. Quentin may have been out of a physical form for only six months, but this feels like waking up after being in a coma for an eternity.

“Now,” Mayakovsky says, opening the portal once the flickering stops, “get out of my house.”

Alice gives Mayakovsky one last nod of thanks before passing through. Quentin makes a move to follow her, but Mayakovsky’s firm hand on his shoulder holds him back. 

“Go fuck pretty boy you wish to fuck,” Mayakovsky says as Quentin turns around to face him. “You have second chance at life. Do not—do not—let opportunity for love die again.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, when El was at Brakebills South in his fist year, Mayakovsky called him "pretty boy". It's pretty much canon.


	5. Eyes Wide Open

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Quentin fixes a bottle of scotch. Julia ponders about Keys.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I LIIIIIIVVVEEE! (Just like Quentin.)

**** **_Quentin_ **

Quentin doesn’t recognize this room when he walks through a portrait on the wall. Alice, though, turns immediately to look him in the eye, her fingers pinching the edge of her skirt as she draws in a shaky breath. The broken mirror stands there in its frame, the fragmented pieces already swept away, no doubt before Professor Van der Weghe’s classroom had been sealed off, his body quietly removed from the premises.

Why does it always have to be mirrors?

Alice had tried and failed to summon Charlie. The Beast walked through instead. The other professors must have locked the door and put some kind of ward around it after the students had all been evacuated. Mayakovsky, though, didn’t give a fuck about wards, so here they are.

It felt like a lifetime ago. What happened here _was_ a lifetime ago, for Quentin _and_ Alice.

The door flies open as Alice throws a clean spell upon it, making a loud bang that echoes in the quiet halls. Alice gives him a quick look before leaving abruptly. Quentin follows without turning his head and sprints out, half-believing the Beast himself had climbed out the portal behind them.

Dean Fogg’s office is all the way on the west wing, as far from the classrooms as it gets in Main Hall. Alice waits for Quentin to catch up to her, then they make their way over silently, their footsteps echoing off of the marble floor, reverberating around the walls. If Quentin hadn’t known what real ghosts were like, he would have thought the halls were haunted. Alice stops when they reach the intersection, looking between the west wing and the double doors leading to the outside.

“What now?” Alice whispers.

“It’s midnight,” Quentin says. “You think anyone’s gonna be at the Cottage?”

Alice shakes her head. “Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. They’ve probably gone home.”

“Alright.” Quentin pauses, thinking. “Can you find the payphone? Call the others, tell them to meet there?”

“You’ll talk to him?” Alice takes a peek down the hall. The light inside the Dean’s office slips through underneath the door, casting gloomy yellow shadows across the dark tiles. If Dean Fogg had heard the loud bang, he hadn’t opened his door to investigate.

Quentin nods. Alice gives him one last smile before heading out. Through the front windows, he sees her run across the lawn. He hurries down the west wing and stops in front of the Dean’s door.

He tries not to look around too much because nothing looks like it’s changed. This hall looks exactly the same it did when he’d walked inside fuck knows how long ago, asking if there was a way to save his dad’s life. It looks as if nothing happened at all.

Like nothing happened at all.

“Well,” Fogg says on the other end, the shadow of his form blocking off part of the light from below the door’s gap. “Don’t just stand there.”

Quentin is the one who opens the door. He steps in slowly, opening his mouth to explain himself. Fogg startles before he can say anything, freezes in place, then lets go of his grip on a bottle of old scotch he’d been holding. 

“Fuck me.” The Dean bends down, holding his hand out to cast a spell and repair the bottle. “You’re alive.”

The glass shards hover in mid-air as Quentin stares at the shattered remains, placing themselves back like a puzzle. Quentin wills the liquid to pick itself up and flow back inside the bottle—not much scotch left, anyway. And no cork in sight.

“Looks like it,” Quentin says. 

“ _Ha_.” The Dean says simply. He looks Quentin dead in the eye for a second, then sets the bottle back on his desk, chuckling as he sits back down. “Shade miracle. You’ve taken it from the Underworld. Replaced your magic with—well—” he waves at the bottle of scotch.

Quentin sits across from the Dean. “You know about Shade miracles?”

“I looked them up after your little… trip. With Julia.” Dean Fogg sighs. “And after you, well—”

“After I died?”

“After you died. I didn’t know what happens to the Shade if someone dies in the Mirror Realm. Still don’t.”

“Mine followed me to the Underworld,” Quentin says. “It never left. Never shattered like the rest of me when the spell hit.”

Fogg looks at him again, leaning closer. Quentin feels himself sink a little in his seat under the scrutiny. “I told myself once,” Fogg finally says, “that there was no chance to bring someone back to life. And then you did, with Alice. With her Shade. So I wondered.”

“You were right to,” Quentin tells him. “That’s how I came back. My Shade pulled me through all the way.”

“And your magic?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin says. “I think I let go of my old life back there in the Underworld. Or my depression. Or something like that. I… I made a confession. Penny was there. I wasn’t expecting to come back.”

_But I wanted to._

He had taken one last look at his friends, sitting silently by the fire after the song had ended, and admitted to himself that he wasn’t ready. That was the one confession he hadn’t told before he departed through the gate. Penny hadn’t asked.

“Magic comes from pain,” Fogg reiterates, thinking. “And how do you feel now?”

“I’m happy to be back.”

Dean Fogg chuckles. “That could explain why you lost your magic.”

It’s weird. There was a time when losing magic would have devastated Quentin. But that felt like a lifetime ago. Now he can’t bring himself to give a fuck. He can’t bring himself to grieve for something he’s fallen out of love with. And besides, what’s magic compared to literally coming back from the dead?

“I’m sure it’ll come back someday,” Quentin says. “Everything’s going to shit, and I’m back in the middle of it.”

“So I heard.” Fogg takes the repaired bottle of scotch and gives it another sip before passing it to Quentin. Quentin almost accepts, but thinks better of it and shakes his head. It’ll be a while before he can get reacquainted with booze. “Alma told me about the missing Shades earlier.”

“Who?”

“Professor Lipson.”

“Oh. Yeah. I was there.” The Dean raises an eyebrow but stays silent. Quentin continues, “So these monsters. What do you know?”

“Nothing more than what Alma told me.”

“Okay. Well. Who do you think M.C. could be?” Quentin asked. 

Fogg looks at him with a frown. “Where did you hear that name?”

“I was at Mayakovsky’s earlier. He revived me. Long story, I was unconscious most of the time, it’s—” Quentin stops, then waves it off. The full story of his resurrection can wait.“Mayakovsky mentioned reading a book on Shadowraiths. One where the author signed their name. Just their initials. _M.C._ _Victory of Nightmares_? Something like that.”

“ _Victoria sequuntur somnia_ ,” Fogg finishes. “Last I heard, Harriet and Zelda have the only copy in their possession. I planned to borrow it for the third year zoology students.”

“I saw the Shadowraiths down in the desert earlier, where the hedges were attacked. They could see me, too. I… I wasn’t entirely alive by then, so—what I mean is, they nearly killed my Shade. And this author, whoever they are, they’re interested in Shades. Do you think they’re collecting Shades for something? Like a spell?”

“Our Shades don’t power our magic. They’re separate from it. But they’re important.”

“Yeah. Keeps us on a good path. I know.”

“Our magic comes from pain,” Fogg continues. “Why do you think the pain in some of us is strong enough to trigger these magical abilities, powers that—some argue—humans should never be trusted to possess?”

“It’s the Shade, isn’t it? Magic comes to us because we wanna do something about our pain.”

The Dean nods. “Our Shades are stronger than we give them credit for. So strong that, once lost, we might find it impossible to stay on a moral path. Niffins are a good example of malevolent magic without a Shade’s guidance. But you don’t have to die to become dangerous. You don’t have to become something else to be driven purely by desire.”

“That’s what M.C. wants? Magicians without morals?”

“A magician without their Shade is harmless until you give them a choice between what’s good and what’s powerful. I believe,” Fogg speculates, “that the person summoning these monsters is biding their time until there are enough Shadeless magicians to overpower the rest of us.”

“Not if we stop it in time,” Quentin says.

Fogg watches him without blinking. He stares back, wondering if Fogg’s gonna stop him and his friends from doing whatever it is they’re about to do. “You’re a wild card, Quentin,” he finally says. “You know, before Jane started making time loops, I believed if anyone were gonna come back from the dead, by some goddamned miracle, it would have been you. Thirty-nine timelines later, and… fuck me. I was right.”

“Mayakovsky told me it was a one-time thing,” Quentin explains.

“Well, then.” Fogg smiles. “I hope whatever it is you and your friends get up to won’t get you killed a second time.”

Quentin is about to thank him when they hear footsteps approach the office door. Fogg powers up a spell in hand as the door springs open to reveal Julia’s face. Fogg waves his hands and lets the spell go—maybe. Quentin doesn’t stop long enough to see the spell vanish. He’s already running over, pulling Julia into a hug as she freezes in place, stiff as a log.

“Hey, Jules,” he whispers.

Julia relaxes in his arms then, letting out a breath in relief when she hears his voice. She nestles her head against his chest, fitting into his form like muscle memory. Quentin can’t remember the last time he hugged Julia like this. She breaks into sobs as he strokes the back of her head, and he lets her stay in his arms like this. It’s been so long—too long—since he had last saw Julia. It’s the first time Quentin feels like he’s been gone six months. 

“I had to see.” Julia looks up with tears streaming down her cheeks, washing off the makeup she’d put on to disguise the dark circles below her eyes. “Penny told me. He took me here. Everyone’s at the Cottage now, but I had to see.”

“It’s me, Jules,” Quentin says. “I’m back.”

Being alive once means a lot of things that are impossible to articulate. Being alive a second time means remembering. Everything Quentin feels now is a reminder of something he missed, a memory he wouldn’t give up for the world. Something he has no idea just how much he missed ‘till he’s brought back to the moment it happened. And everything about Julia makes him wonder how the fuck he ever decided he was ready to leave it all behind.

Quentin holds Julia close as they turn to look at Fogg, who had remained seated, watching them both with a smile. Julia is close enough that the muscles on her chest nudge gently against Quentin’s every time she takes a breath. He pulls her closer.

“I can leave,” Fogg says. “Give you some space.”

Quentin feels his cheeks warm. Julia chuckles and sticks her head out from where it was buried in Quentin’s borrowed Brakebills sweatshirt. “We’ll go somewhere else. Goodnight, Dean Fogg.”

“Like I’ve said, call me Henry,” Fogg says.

With another quick “goodnight”, they leave, hand-in-hand, and close the door.

“Henry, huh?” Quentin asks as they walk down the hall to the front door.

“Weird, isn’t it?” Julia says. She opens the door and gestures for him to go first. “Still can’t bring my head around it. And I was Kim, the last time I remember calling him Dean.”

Quentin steps out, humming in surprise when he realizes it’s not that cold out. Alice had told him it’s Thanksgiving tomorrow, but November means nothing when he’d been at the South Pole not one hour ago. “Old habits die hard.” Quentin reaches for Julia’s hand again and leads her across the lawn. “So. Fogg asked you to come back here?”

“I think he felt bad for me,” Julia says.

Quentin isn’t thinking of where he wants to go, but he brings her to Woof Fountain. Instead of sitting at the edge by the fountain itself, they reach for the lamp post, the only one painted dark green instead of black. They hold on to the pole at the same time. Quentin closes his eyes as he braces himself for the plunge, the dreaded deep dive. The transporting spell tugs uncomfortably in the hollows of Quentin’s body as it pulls him and Julia into a quiet little spot by the Hudson River. 

A few decades ago a student had decided to build himself a shortcut to the woods fifty minutes north from campus—his own little version of Narnia if you would. But he’d had a little too much to drink and fucked up the spell, so the lamp post ended up transporting people to the river bank instead. The bank’s only a ten-minute walk from here, anyway, but people liked having a little taste of teleportation. Nearly everyone had used the lamp post since, including the faculty. Fogg saw no reason to get rid of it. So there it stayed. 

They let go and find a bench that overlooks the river. The dim lights around them cast long shadows across the ground, shadows that stretch so far that the tip of Quentin’s head looks like it’s touching the water.

“I come here all the time,” Julia says. “I like to sit here for a bit after the library’s closed before I have to go back to Kady’s. Helps me think.”

Julia is the only one who calls the apartment Kady’s as if she had already accepted it as home before the rest of them. Quentin looks at the lamp-post again. The first time Quentin showed it to Julia was after she and Kady had come back to Brakebills following her failed abortion. Quentin had wanted to make Julia smile, if only for a second. Even Niffin Alice had given them space, scowling as she’d watched them from a distance.

“You should’ve been here with us from the start,” Quentin tells Julia. “In all the other timelines you were. I’m kind of jealous of the other versions of me.

I mean, we were—it’s like we were in Hogwarts, Jules.”

“You are such a nerd.”

“You and me both. That’s why shit keeps happening to us.”

“Be careful what you wish for, right?”

November is starting to catch up to Quentin now that his body’s getting used to being back. Julia huddles close to him, laying her head on his shoulder. He puts his arm around her, trying so stubbornly to stay warm so they can stay out here as long as they wish.

“It’s not always bad, though,” Quentin says, “I wished to come back. And I’m here.”

They used to sit like this all the time in Prospect Park after dark, tossing pebbles into Bailey Fountain to see who could make a bigger splash. It was their only downtime in the evenings before they’d head home and go to bed and start everything again the next day, feeling the hours tick by as they bury their minds in schoolwork.

On the off chance that they had a free weekend, they’d go down to the Hudson and see how far they could skip stones into the river. By the bank, Quentin would try and fail to surprise Julia with a new sleight-of-hand trick—she’d seen it all after years of being his first audience. Julia would ramble on about her three-hundred-and-eighty-seven ways to catch a Questing Beast. Quentin had held a grudge against Julia for growing out of it all. It took going to Fillory with Julia for him to realize he was the one who allowed them to grow apart.

“Q,” Julia says, “I’m happy you’re here.”

“I know,” he tells her. “Me, too.”

Julia looks at him for a second, then ducks down and grabs a fistful of something, reemerging with a big grin on her face. Before Quentin can ask, she dumps a dozen little stones on his lap, gathering the rest of the stones in her hands. She deftly flicks her wrist. They watch as her first stone skip five times before sinking in the water.

Quentin gives her a look. “Really?”

“Show me a new trick,” Julia insists. “See if you can surprise me now.”

With a smirk, Quentin picks out the smallest stone in his bunch, a misshapen one that looks like it had been cleaved in half. He holds it up to the dim light and examines it for a second, noting the rough cross-section against the rest of the smooth surface. His toss is much less graceful than hers, more like a throw. The stone makes a big arc in the air before plunging straight down into the water.

But before she can laugh and tell him to try again—his best record was seven skips back in the day, hers was thirteen—the stone halts in midair and starts glowing. The aura around it brightens itself, turning from a faint gray all the way into bright white, like a little replica of the moon they can’t see. Quentin lowers his chin and lets the now-glowing stone lower itself slowly into the water instead of plunging. Julia leans over to look while the stone sinks itself further and further below the surface until the last of its aura disappears from view. 

“You’ve still got magic?” Julia asks.

“Kind of?” Quentin shrugs. “It’s my Shade. It’s something else.”

Quentin picks up another stone and readies himself for another throw. Julia shakes her head and forces his arm down. “My turn,” she says.

Julia gives him a wink, then holds the stone on her open palm and blows on it softly as if it’s a piece of feather. The stone thrusts itself forward like an arrow, flying all the way to the middle of the river before it stops abruptly. It shoots upward twenty feet high before it lets itself drop again, making a big splash in the water that looks like a crown. Julia stares intensely at the splash, making it hold its shape for a minute.

“Not bad for a first-year,” Quentin jokes when she finally lets the spell drop.

“If I were in your year, you’d be terrified of me.” 

“I’m still terrified of you.”

It’s not the first time Quentin sees Julia’s magic, but it’s the first time his newly-awakened Shade senses it. Julia used to wear her magic like armor, but now she lets the magic speak for her. Her magic is a part of her, just like the Shade is a part of Quentin.

“It’s not always like this,” she says quickly. “It wasn’t strong at all before you came back.”

“That’s not why I’m impressed, Jules. I’m impressed because you’ve lost magic twice, but it always comes back to you.”

She nods. Shrugs. Looks away. “I’m impressed by your new trick,” she changes the topic. “You got any others up your sleeve?”

Quentin looks at Julia as she stares out at the water, noting the way she’s forcing herself not to blink as if she’s trying to stay awake. He wants to apologize for leaving her, knowing she spent months trying to reclaim the life of the powerful magician she could have had from the beginning. But what’s done is done. He had left. All he can do now is promise himself to be more careful. 

When Quentin reaches out to touch Julia’s cheek, he feels the haze in her brain, the familiar buzz of sleep deprivation overtaking him. The way the nerves behind her eyes prickle every time she looks at something bright makes him twitch a little. He brings her toward him by the chin and leans in so their foreheads touch, and he imagines the pain in her head permeating its way out, lured out by the pull of his powers. 

He lets go of Julia just as the headache dissipates in the air between them, leaving nothing more than the warm tingle of a magical residue in the air. She stares at him with wide eyes, twitching her nose. The giggle finally escapes. “What the hell.”

“Better?”

“Now _that’s_ a miracle.”

They cast the rest of the stones without saying much else, trying to skip them as far as they can, guiding them with their powers as they try to one-off each other. It’s not a game someone plays after their friend comes back from the Underworld, but normalcy is the one thing they killed a long time ago. 

“Haven’t you noticed,” Julia says a few moments later, taking her eyes off the water to look at him again, “that we never have magic at the same time?”

“Huh. I’ve never thought about it that way.”

“And if we do, we’re not in the same place? Or not for long. Not working together.”

“It’s never happened in the other timelines.” 

“I bet we’re too powerful this time,” Julia speculates. “Jane’s time-turner thing, or whatever she used, must’ve been terrified of what we can do.”

“We need a break.”

“Don’t we?” Julia agrees. “I’d suggest we pack up and head to Fillory for a nice week or two, but things went to shit over there.”

“Fillory,” Quentin mumbles. “Yeah. Sure did.”

_Fillory_. This word, this place, used to spark an inexplicable joy in him when nothing else could. But he repeats it now, noticing how foreign the word tastes on his tongue, how strange it sounds. Because in the end, when it came to moving on, it wasn’t the land of fantasy he’d missed. It was his people. 

It’s been more than six months since Quentin had thought about Fillory.

“Shit,” Julia blurts out, yanking Quentin away from his impending existential crisis. She jumps out of her seat on the bench. “Jesus, Fillory! Q, I think I know who it is!”

“Who?”

“The book, the victory of whatever-you-call-it. The author of the book. Penny told me about it on our way here—M.C.”

“Fuck.” Quentin stands up, too. She’s already at the lamp, her hand hovering an inch away from the post. He reaches for her hand and puts the other on the lamp post. They spin with the force of the transport spell, and within moments they’re standing in front of Woof Fountain again. Quentin breathes in slowly until his head stops spinning.

“Those little notes we used to write to each other,” Julia continues, speaking faster. Quentin strains his ears as he tries to catch everything she says. “Third grade, every day before the end of school. We went by Jane and Martin. We always signed our notes. Remember?”

Realization dawns on Quentin. “I signed as Martin Chatwin. M.C.”

“We gotta find the others.”

“But Martin’s dead—” Quentin starts before another name comes to mind.

“ _Plover_ ,” they say at the same time.

Julia grabs Quentin by the hand, and he follows her as they cut across the lawn and pick up their pace, searching for the Physical Kids Cottage. “He wanted everything Martin had. He could’ve found his notes.”

“Shit. We gotta find the others.” Julia grabs Quentin by the hand.

Julia takes the lead as they sprint, pulling Quentin along as he tries to follow without tripping over his own feet. The muscles on his legs are burning. He doesn’t remember how much his body’s supposed to strain during a run, but he welcomes the tightness in his lungs as he breathes in and out, and in, and out. 

Quentin listens to sound of his breathing mixed in with the pattering of their footsteps, all the auditory input mixing into one staccato of madness in their rush to get to the Cottage. His eyes draw in and out of focus before he spots the familiar house not fifty feet away. He shuffles through all the clues in his mind, trying to string together what this all means: Martin Chatwin had studied the Shadowraiths. He’d wanted to bring them into the physical plane to work for him. Apparently, he’d found other ways to terrify people without bringing monsters from the nether plane over.

But someone else could’ve gotten their hands on those hidden notes. Someone who knows magic and Martin too well. Someone—Christopher Plover—who defied the rules of death, and is still around, burdened by a convenient curse that renders him immortal and fucking impossible to kill.

◊

**_Julia_ **

_The shield grew around Julia from the ground up, trapping her in a heptagonal space. Seven transparent walls of protection. The walls glowed aqua blue as spells clashed against them, catching red sparks inside the flat surface for three seconds before shooting them back out towards her attacker._

_Albertsen's Shield could hold up to seven people, ideally one standing behind each wall inside the heptagonal enclosure. The shield didn’t require six magicians to raise, but it fed on a never-ending stream of energy from the casting. One magician working at a time was enough; feed it while the others took turns to give their poor hands a break. But Julia couldn’t worry about that. She was alone._

_Julia’s fingers strained in protest as she commanded them to twist and bend in the pattern she’d memorized: Popper 68, 95, 42. Repeat. Repeat again._

_It was not a perfect cover—it was a shield, not a dome, although domes came with their own tactical weaknesses. But at the moment, if Julia were faced with an onslaught from above, nothing would have stopped the attack. Still, it would have been sufficient for most battles. It would have been plenty helpful back when Julia used to find herself in said battles._

_The moment Julia’s thoughts went on this little tangent, her concentration broke enough for the walls to fall too quickly for her to wring her hands back into position. Dean Fogg’s Wind Lash spell stroked her right across the shoulder. She fell back, hitting the back of her head against the wall of the old drawing room and the goddamned bee-and-key tapestry._

_“Five minutes. Three longer than yesterday,” the Dean said._

_Dean Fogg had asked Julia to call him Henry. He’d offered to mentor her magic education regardless of whether she chose to come back to the school; they’d gone through enough shit that her re-enrollment was more of a formality than anything. But Julia had a hard time thinking of the Dean as Henry. Everything she knew about the man was in the context of Brakebills. Plus, Julia didn’t need another reason to remind the other students where she’d already been._

_“Five minutes isn’t long enough,” Julia said. “Let’s go again.”_

_“Albertsen’s Shield is not optimal for one-on-one combat,” Fogg said, shaking his head. “This spell is meant to be raised by more than one magician. Coordinated. But I wanted to teach you first.”_

_Coordinated. Right._

_None of the others had cared to go back to Brakebills alone except Julia, but she supposed Dean Fogg had a hard time thinking about her without the context of her friends, too._

_“Wish we’d known about this shield earlier,” Julia said._

_“You’re thinking about Quentin,” the Dean observed._

_Julia didn’t mind the blunt honesty. She probably needed to hear it out loud, but she recoiled just the same as she inched away from the wall, trying to stand. The back of her head throbbed. It’s gonna bruise in some way. Penny’s gonna insist she puts some ice over it after she gets home._

_Dean Fogg walked over and offered Julia a hand. She took it, pulling herself up, steadying herself before she let go._

_“Magic has terrible timing,” the Dean said. “I suspect, had you and your friends known about this shield earlier, you may not have had the stamina to keep it raised long enough in battle.”_

_Not even for five minutes? Maybe Alice could’ve done it. But they still would’ve been fucked. Nothing good they ever did happen at the right time._

_“I get it. Magic fucks with us.”_

_“_ Life _fucks with us.” Dean Fogg cast a spell to turn off the lights. He turned to leave the room, beckoning for her to follow. “But as magicians, we expect magic to un-fuck too many things.”_

_Julia didn’t notice until the lights were off that it was already past sundown. They were here on a Saturday when no one else was around, but Dean Fogg had insisted they meet for practice anyway. Maybe Julia wasn’t the only one trying to reacquaint herself with magic to make up for lost time._

_“Did anyone actually do it?” Julia stepped out and held the door for Fogg. “Un-fuck enough things in their life that it doesn’t feel like shit anymore?”_

_The door clicked with a shut. Dean Fogg stood in the dark hall in silence, finding the right words. “Every time we learn a new spell,” he said finally, “we start wondering how many times we could’ve done this earlier. How many times we could’ve used it. It took me thirty-nine attempts to try and change the past, Julia, but all I’ve done is created slightly different problems.”_

_“But we survived this time.”_

_The moment Julia said it, she felt a pang in her chest. It was impossible to not think about Quentin when she remembered the other thirty-nine times he’d died. This timeline had to be the last. Quentin was supposed to have lived this time, too. But Quentin was gone—all of him, shattered by his own spell. No Niffin floating around to tether back into his Shade if they ever find it. No nothing._

_“You all survived the Beast,” Fogg said, sensing the way she tensed. “Then something else came along. Fucked you all over again. Magic never offers a permanent solution. But sometimes it does enough to bring you one moment of peace before the next shit storm. And that’s all we can control. Whatever’s in front of us—like a shield we’ve raised. All we can do is pray that it’s enough.”_

No one turns on the overhead lights, but the candles floating around the Cottage Lounge are enough for Julia and her friends to see each other. 

The ambient magic’s back in the air now, and it shows. The Physical Kids Cottage is filled with auto-powering spells. They were made dormant when the ambient had to be conserved, but they’ve woken up since then. Sand shuffles around the hourglass on the bookshelf which is turning itself, counting down the seconds ‘till they figure out their next move. 

It’s way past midnight now, maybe an hour or two before dawn. Julia can’t tell for sure since the face of the grandfather clock-slash-portal had stopped telling the right time months ago—all the world-hopping had probably broken the gears. It’s weird how her friends always had a gathering place before shit went down, even if they’d all been theoretically homeless for fuck knows how long. But Quentin’s wake was the last time they were all in one place. Now Quentin’s the reason they’re back to the beginning.

“We know who M.C. might be,” Julia says. “Martin Chatwin.”

The lounge is silent as everyone watched Quentin without blinking, trying to convince themselves that he’s not a ghost. Quentin clears his throat and catches Julia’s eye across the room. They share a nod. 

“And if Martin’s involved,” Quentin says, “there’s a good chance someone else knows about his work. Someone who’s been around him for years. Christopher Plover.”

Eliot is the first one to look away, tightening his grip on his cane. He’s sitting between Margo and Quentin on one couch. Quentin reaches over and closes his hand over Eliot’s, stroking his knuckles gently. Eliot tenses up at the touch but doesn’t move.

Margo grabs hold of Eliot’s arm, tracing circles on his skin with her thumb. She leans forward to speak. “Fuck. You’re saying he found his way back here? To Earth?”

Julia leans back and tilts her head up to think, tracing the ceiling beams with her eyes. “He could’ve summoned these beasts from somewhere else.”

“You’re saying this might be a diversion?” Kady asks. 

“All the attacks happened on Earth. Plover’s trying to keep us here,” Alice says. “Wherever he is, he doesn’t want us to go look for him.”

“I…” Quentin speaks up again but stops. Julia turns her gaze back down to see Quentin staring at the coffee table, avoiding everyone gaze as he examines the spine of the book Kady had brought—Harriet’s copy of _The Victory of Nightmares_. “I think I know where he might be.”

“How?” Margo asks.

“Penny told me,” Quentin explains. Across the room, Penny raises an eyebrow, but Quentin shakes his head, adding, “Not you. Penny. In the Underworld.”

“Where?” Kady says, flinching at the sound of her Penny’s name.

“Fillory, I think,” Quentin says. “Margo, El—” he looks at the two in question—“when I was down there, I asked Penny about… about you. Your future—sort of. It might’ve changed now. I asked what was gonna happen you, and Penny said you two are gonna go back to Fillory, but you’re gonna end up three hundred years in the future. And Fen’s not High King anymore.”

Margo stands up. “Fucking what?”

“Fillory’s been taken over by someone else. They called him the Dark King. He’s keeping Fen and Josh prisoner. I don’t know if all this is already happening.”

“When was the last time you spoke to them?” Julia asks.

“We haven’t had a bunny from them in weeks,” Eliot mumbles, his voice shaking. “Fen, or Josh. Or Idri.”

“Let’s go.” Margo marches across the room, reaching for her ice axes currently propped against the bookshelf.

Kady stands up and blocks her way, shaking her head as she looks at the grandfather clock. “We can’t risk the portal. Plover might’ve sealed Fillory off.”

“And you’re still banished, Margo,” Alice adds. “Kady’s right. We can’t jump into Whitespire without a plan.”

“Fuck.” Margo sits back down. “Well? I’m all ears.”

“What if I travel in there?” Penny suggests. “Take a look, see what’s going on.”

“Not alone,” Kady says immediately. “I’ll go with you.”

Penny opens his mouth to protest but thinks better of it. He nods and takes Kady’s hand, and three seconds later, they’ve vanished. Margo frowns at the spot where they were moments ago before turning to the grandfather clock again. “If they’re not back here in ten,” Margo says, “we’re going in.”

No one protests as they hold their breaths, hoping Penny and Kady will return in one piece. Margo takes her axes from where they’re standing and sits back down, laying them across her lap. Quentin looks down at his lap and fidgets with his hands. Julia watches him without blinking, taking in the sight of her friend in the Cottage. Quentin looks like he’d rather be anywhere else, but Julia knows he wouldn’t trade this for anything. Quentin came all the way back here to pick up the life he’d left behind. At the end of the day, he’d missed being a part of something like this. 

Quentin looks up to see Julia watching him, and he gives her a smile. _I get it,_ his eyes seem to say. Julia smiles back. She had felt the same way once. But she was a Goddess then, and she could sacrifice her powers. Now all they can give are their lives, and Julia couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else dying on her.

_Being a Goddess was everything at once, every place Julia could ever be._

_Iris’ lab felt like a warm day in spring, a perfect facsimile of a perfect afternoon despite the lack of sun hanging from the open space that looked like a sky. The trees were a species that hadn’t yet been brought to existence outside: hybrids with the furrowed barks of giant sequoias and the hanging leaves of white willows._

_There were no living creatures in sight, but Julia could make out the orchestrated echo of birdsong weaving in and out of the space. The grass around Julia’s feet brushed her gently around the ankles, the tip of the blades too immaculate and smooth. Nothing like the rough, freshly-cut lawn in Prospect Park that she and Quentin used to lie on._

_The thought of Quentin pulled Julia’s mind right back to where he was._

_Fillory. Castle Blackspire. It had been months since Julia had last thought about Fillory, and years since she’d thought about Blackspire. The Monster was there wearing someone else’s skin. He looked at Quentin with a curious tilt of his head. Quentin drew out a deck of cards as he kept his gaze, preparing himself for an eternal game of Find the Queen._

_“My friends. How come I can still feel them?” Julia asked._

_Iris paused in the middle of her speech about healing the occasional kid for morale. Julia could tell her patience was wearing thin; even Gods had a hard time hiding their emotions. “Takes a bit for those connections to dissolve.”_

_Julia gave a vague nod, still watching the scene unfold through Quentin’s eyes. The Monster, watching Quentin shuffle the deck with expert hands. A gunshot. (She remembered the God-killing bullet she’d taken from Reynard.) Golden sparks escaping from the fresh corpse. Quentin turned to see Eliot standing behind him, his hand shaking as he held the gun._

_Julia turned her mind away from Quentin for a brief second to ponder about worlds. Iris could probably tell she was drifting. It was an odd thing to wrap her head around because even Fillory used to be nothing but fiction to her. Now she knew Fillory was a very real place among millions. A list of names ran through her head, all the places the Gods had created from the first moment in time._

_“…one of my best friends wouldn’t spend the rest of his life locked in a prison, guarding what turns out to be a really not-so-scary monster,” Eliot was saying as he lowered the gun._

_Julia could still hear her friends. She_ wanted _to hear them. The sound of the gunshot reverberated around the chamber long after the Monster had fallen. Margo was there. Quentin was pulled away from the scene. If Julia was there, what would she have done?_

_This was supposed to be their quest. Julia had been part of it, or so she had thought. All along, she had been placed on the path of a different quest._

_Iris stood up and gestured for Julia to follow. Julia complied, snapping her mind back abruptly, watching the gentle trickle of steam rise from the mouth of Iris’ teapot sitting on the picnic table. After watching her friends’ reality unfold, Julia was almost disappointed to see the lab again, the place that marked the beginning of so many worlds. This place felt like an idea. Just that. It hadn’t been given a chance to live on its own. Iris had forced vitality upon it, crafted her lab to mimic a wild forest found on Earth, then perfected every leaf down to its last vein._

_“So, where shall we start?” Iris asked. “Ocean? Cute little landmass?”_

_Down in Blackspire, Alice was destroying the Keys. They burned like fire in her hands, the residual magic tingling underneath the skin of her fingers and palms. Alice wished for the burns to spread, to incinerate every ounce of magic, to put out all that misery for good. The Keys melted under Alice’s spell and slipped through the gaps between her fingers, drizzling on the ground in molten heaps._

_“I know you can still feel them. You need to let them go,” Iris said, watching Julia with an arched eyebrow._

_Quentin’s heart was pounding, wrenching itself at the sight of the destruction. Alice turned away from Quentin a second too late, shaking as she caught his crestfallen look. But Alice let out a shuddered breath all the same, feeling something heavy dissipate from her chest._

_A beating heart meant nothing in an indestructible body. Julia hadn’t felt the pounding in her chest since she’d ascended into the divine plane. She hadn’t thought about mortality for hours—or had it been a day? And now she watched Quentin kneel on the ground to look at what was left of the Keys, bruising the skin beneath his jeans against the uneven cobblestone ground._

_“I know,” Julia told Iris. “But it’s bad.”_

_Human Julia would have reacted instead of watched. She would have lashed out with magic or tried to fix the Keys. Her magic wouldn’t have been enough, but she would have tried. Goddess Julia felt a tightness in her throat at the sight of Quentin’s lost hope, a pained echo in the hollows of her chest where her once-quickening heart would’ve plummeted. Julia drew her mind away from her friends then—she was already becoming something else, reading people as a Goddess would._

_Being human felt bare._

_Human thoughts were exposed to the Gods to use as they pleased. Human possessions meant nothing after people lived out the limited mortality they’d been given, by which point the meaning behind their personal relics would die with them. The only irreplaceable thing about humans were the emotions born out of ambiguity, out of circumstances that mortals couldn’t find the words to explain, but would spend their whole lives trying to understand._

_Their whole lives._

_A thousand years would feel like a few minutes to Julia. But not to Quentin. Not to their friends, or her sister McKenzie, or Dean Fogg. Not to the father she hadn’t spoken to in years. (When was the last time she thought about him?) These people’s lives would become their whole reality, but only a fraction of Julia’s._

_“In a blink, it’ll be good again,” Iris said. It was almost like she could hear Julia think. “And in two blinks, they’ll be long gone.”_

_The Gods understood it all. They had lost the purpose of trying to find meaning. They had all the answers and all the time in the world to do something about this. To do what, exactly? Perhaps this was why they stayed so close to the humans, but just out of reach, answering every millionth prayer before turning away again. It must have scared the Gods like hell to see how bare the humans felt, trying to find some reason to keep going, shattering at the slightest hint of lost hope._

_“He’s on the floor,” Julia said. “He’s… He’s not getting up. He’ll die, not giving up.”_

_Julia had the power to restore that hope._

_She could blink. Tear her mind away from Blackspire again. Look at the perfect blades of grass and the trees-yet-to-be-named and the golden shadow that the made-up sunlight cast across her skin. She could build a world with Iris, a world where magical Keys could never be destroyed. But Julia didn’t care about that world. That world was a world without Quentin. It took spending a day in omniscience for Julia to realize that while she may stop feeling Quentin’s pain, she would never stop caring._

_Julia kept her eyes wide open. “Can’t you feel his heart?”_

Penny and Kady crash-land on the carpet in the middle of the room, breathing heavily. Kady’s covered in dirt, twigs and leaves buried in her messy curls stick out like spikes. Penny loses his balance and falls over on the carpet.

Julia walks over to give Penny a hand, pulling him up. “Jesus, what happened?”

“There was a fucking barricade around Fillory or something.”

“The entire kingdom?” Eliot asks.

Penny shakes his head, sitting down next to Julia. He’s picking at a scrape on his elbow with a scowl. “Just the citadel, but it looks like it’s expanding. I tried to jump us into those stables behind Whitespire. Some spell tossed us out before we could land. We crashed in some woods by the East Lorian border.”

They hear a whooshing sound from the ceiling before a gray bunny lands gracefully on the coffee table, glancing at _The Victory of Nightmare_ with intrigue before turning back to look Julia in the eye. As Julia watches, the bunny’s eyes glow red. It hovers up a few inches so it’s not standing on anything, just floating in the air like a ghost.

“A valiant effort,” a woman’s voice echoes from the bunny’s mouth, sending a shudder down Julia’s spine. It had been months—maybe a year?—since she’d last heard this voice. “Your friends are safe with me inside my defenses. Yes, _my_ defenses. Christopher has agreed to collaborate. He did a nice job with those Shade-snatching beasts of his, but I knew it was only a matter of time. So come. I’ll be waiting.”

The bunny vanishes in a puff of smoke, leaving smoldering remains in the air. Julia can smell the way it’s burning. The candles around the room begin to dim underneath the influence of the dark energy. Alice waves her hand quickly, casting a spell to vanish the rest of the residue.

“Was that Irene McAllister?” Quentin says.

“Should’ve known that bitch is behind this.” Margo seethes. “She’s been AWOL for months. Pretty unlike her. Now we fucking know why.”

“What kind of barricade?” Alice asks Penny and Kady. “Did you see what it looked like?”

“Some kind of glowing runes when I made contact with the shield. Slavic runes, I think.” Kady pulls a jagged branch out of her hair and throws it on the ground, shaking her head to get the dry leaves out, too. “Glowing red, like that bunny’s eyes. There was a wall full of them in the air. I didn’t see how high up it goes.”

Alice hands Kady a piece of paper. Kady starts writing down whatever she remembers. “There were seven different runes. They kept on repeating in different sequences ‘till the whole wall’s covered.”

Kady finishes writing and hands the paper to Alice, who squints, holding it by the nearest candlelight. “I know this spell,” Alice mutters, running a finger down the list of runes. “There was a book in the Library about it. Karasu’s Wall. It freezes the place in a moment in time.”

“So Irene trapped them in some kind of future version of Fillory?” Penny asks.

“Three hundred years passed outside of the wall when Margo and El got to the border,” Quentin says. “I don’t know what it’s like inside the citadel.”

Julia pressed her lips together, thinking. Fillory had been disintegrating since Ember had ruined the wellspring, not to mention Everett had depleted the Secret Sea months ago. Present-day Fillory is pretty much a shit show. The glory of it was in the past.

“What if Irene trapped the place in an older version of Fillory?” Julia asks.

Eliot and Quentin turn to look at each other. A hint of smile escapes the corner of Eliot’s mouth. Margo gives them a questioning look, and Quentin gives her a nod. Quentin sees Julia watching and gives her a look that says, _I’ll tell you later_.

“Makes sense,” Kady says. “That’s where the best magic was.”

“Alright. Well,” Margo says, “I’m banished, and there’s a fucking wall of runes in place of a moat. How the fuck are we supposed to get in?”

“It’s a wall,” Alice says. “Not a dome. So the sky’s our best chance.”

“You want us to fly in?” Penny asks. 

Alice nods, completely serious. “All walls have their limits. Do we still have the Muntjac?”

“It’s docked in East Loria,” Margo says.

“Since when?” Eliot asks.

“Fen had it docked there after she banished me.” Margo’s expressions remain neutral, but Julia can detect a hint of a smile in her tone. “Said she wanted me to find it if I decided to walk my way back. Idri agreed to keep an eye on it.”

“Any of you know what the docks look like?” Penny asks. “I can’t travel if I don’t know where I’m going.”

“I remember it,” Eliot says, tapping the side of his head. “I’ll show you.”

Five minutes later, Penny emerges from his trance and nods. Eliot and Margo are taken over first, ice axes in tow. Penny comes back alone after a short wait to announce that the crew had recognized the former Kings, and Idri wishes them good luck on their next quest. 

Alice and Kady look at each other before they turn to Quentin and Julia. “We’ll come back for you,” Kady says, clutching _The Victory of Nightmares_ in one hand.

“Thank you,” Julia says, grateful for the moment alone. 

Alice and Kady take Penny’s hand and vanish. Penny doesn’t come back immediately, but Julia and Quentin stand up and walk to the middle of the room, waiting. Julia dims all the candles except for one that’s nearly burned, hoping it’ll extinguish soon after they’re gone.

They hear a soft knock from the door on the grandfather clock. A warm glow emits from behind it and grows in intensity before someone on other side opens the door ajar. It’s Alice, and she peeks her head out, grinning in satisfaction. “The Illusion Key's gone, but the portal's still active,” Alice says. “We’ll be on the deck.”

Alice disappears again. Julia hears her fading footsteps as she leaves the cabin to climb back on to the deck, giving Julia and Quentin the space they need. The door of the grandfather clock swings slightly as the wind from the East Lorian border nudges it along, telling them to hurry.

It’s gonna take a long time before Julia can convince herself Quentin isn’t going anywhere. A few weeks, maybe months. She’s too afraid to let herself hope. Instead, she focuses on what’s in front of her: Quentin standing by the grandfather clock-portal; the way he smiles at the sight of her; the sound of his quiet breaths in the even quieter lounge, the silence broken by the groan of the hinges on the carved wooden clock door. All of this is as real as the magic that once again courses through Julia’s body, hungry for the next spell.

Everyone else had gone to set up the sail. The Muntjac is sitting in the dock, waiting for the last two questers. Quentin holds out his hand and gives Julia a twinkling-eyed look. Julia reaches out as Quentin steps through first and lets him pull her to the other side of the portal, feeling the ground beneath her sway slightly as she steps on board the ship. 

Julia closes the door behind her and pulls out the makeshift key Alice had stuck. Her friends are up on the deck, arguing about how far South they should sail before they try to get the ship to fly up. Through the windows of the cabin, Julia can see that dawn is breaking on the shore, casting warm shadows against the ripples on the surface of the ocean. Quentin joins her by the window, his soft breath tickling the top of her head.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Quentin asks. 

She turns around, misty-eyed, and pulls Quentin into another hug as the ship lurches forward of its own accord, carrying them into the open water. The question escapes her lips before she can stop it, “Are you scared?”

“With Julia Wicker on board?” Quentin teases, ducking his head so his cheek brushes against hers. Julia laughs despite herself as she relaxes in his arms, letting out a snort. “Only a little.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who are still here, I am so, so amazed at your loyalty. It's taken me, like, a quest and a half to get this fucking chapter out. The perfectionist in me kept getting in the way whenever life wasn't and it wasn't a fun limbo to be in, hehe. But I sucked it up and channeled some Julia energy and got it done. It was great fun trying to write from the perspective of a Goddess. 
> 
> Next up: WHO'S READY FOR THE SOFT QUELIOT FEELS THAT THE TAGS PROMISED?! I'll try to update chapter six in three weeks since I've got plans, but I do know that plans (and word counts, smh) tend to run out of hand with me! The chapter may or may not feature a piece of backstory from the Mosaic Timeline, told from Eliot's POV, because yes, IT'S ELIOT'S TURN TO BE A NARRATOR! WHOO!
> 
> P.S. I absolutely adore Julia, and I hope I did her justice in this chapter. I've also been busy preparing a fic idea for this other big fandom event—some of you might know what it is. My contribution will be a Fen/Margo fic with a side of Queliot. *Squeals.*


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